In the movie Tomorrow War, why do people go to the future to fight the aliens when the logical thing to do is to go in the past where their numbers are low or at the starting point?
Certainly, this is the best option, what was stopping them?
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4 Answers
As addressed in articles such as https://screenrant.com/tomorrow-war-movie-time-travel-rules-paradox-explained/, it is explained to the recruits that the portal from the future is locked to a range of 29 years in its past. There is not an option to go to another time.
Also, so the movie can happen.
This is addressed in the film script, in what can only be described as the worst written infodump ever.
NORAH: Why can’t we just keep jumping back to earlier in the war?
[LT. CYRIL IKEMBA (24), a stiff science-officer, steps up.]
LT. IKEMBA: The Jumplink doesn’t work that way.
GREG: Jumplink?
LT. IKEMBA: It’s the temporal displacement device that makes all your armbands work.
[Science Officer LT. TRAN (20s), explains-]
LT. TRAN: Time only flows in one direction. It’s like a river. The Jumplink placed two rafts on that river, thirty years apart. We can jump back and forth between them, but both rafts must always keep moving forward.
CHARLIE: Couldn’t you make more rafts?
LT. TRAN: The vast amount of resources it took to make this Jumplink work in the first place... sourcing the rare earth metals, the fusion processing alone -- we simply don’t have enough to make more.
LT. IKEMBA: The Jumplink tech is held together with chewing gum and chicken wire. It isn’t in its infancy, it’s still in the womb. If we weren’t in an extinction level event we’d still be jumping lab rats. We can jump you to 2051. We can jump you back. Period.
In short, the clock in San Dimas is always running. We just have to accept it and move on with the film.
I believe the reason they did not send soldiers back initially is because making changes to the past would alter their future, erasing their timeline - where they are losing yes, but sending soldiers to the future was a way of buying time to create a viable weapon against the aliens that they could then send back. Had they began the war earlier with no effective weapon against them, it likely would have prevented humanity from having the resources or time to develop one - with no way to go to the past, as simply having awareness of the threat at that date was not enough to stop it
In the movie they explain that they were only able to hook up one worm hole to one time and even that was jury-rigged. So they didn't have the time, the technology, or the resources to create multiple worm holes.
answered Sep 14, 2021 at 13:44
