‘The Tomorrow War’ (2021): Derivatives and Derivations.

“We had just herded them up and slaughtered them, the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species.”
― Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

A new sci-fi film, ‘The Tomorrow War’ has erupted onto our viewing platforms with everything you could require for a superbly entertaining thrillfest. My following discussion and discussions are meant to perform like hypertext lexias, inviting the reader to constuct significance out of ruptures, juxtapositions and implied links.

In the movie there is time-travel, an insatiable and unstoppable, alien invader, and a war for the very survival of humanity. A war, that we are, losing. It has the standard tropes of sci-fi films with the added bonus of threats that we are now facing directly and tangentially in our real world — global warming and an attack from an unstoppable inhuman creature analogous to the Covid — 19 virus. A nod and a wink to any viral zoonotic pathogen that has arisen and will now arise, in association with — and ultimately because of — climate change and environmental degradation.

It has a decent plotline and some highly topical themes and realtime relevance as I have just mentioned. However, for me although I enjoyed the ride it was a missed opportunity. For the film overturns the normal safe world with a…