The Diet of an Alien
It was an Alien Invasion / Aliens Trying to Eat You / Time Travel movie sort of weekend.
SPOILERS AHEAD…
Tomorrow War – Aliens invade Earth, eat humans, humans’ time travel to the past to gather troops to fight back.
A Quiet Place Part 2 – Aliens crash land on Earth via Meteors, try to eat humans.
Edge of Tomorrow – Aliens invade Earth, more time travel involved. I didn’t see any humans get eaten in this one.
I watched all these back to back to back… I just zoned out and watched…
So, there are a lot of conspiracy people out there, I refuse to call them “theorist,” as a real theory can be grounded in some sort of hypothetical situation based on some fact.
Simply making claims about dragons, the moon being a hologram and the Earth being a flat disc with no real science of fact to demonstrate does not consist as a “real theory.”
Sketchy YouTube videos using pseudo-science as your best attempts at fact gathering; where the popular definition of pseudo is fake and/or made up. So yeah, we are not going there. There are whole websites dedicated to nonsense thinking like that.
Go there… SPOILERS AHEAD…
“Tomorrow War” has a lot of holes in it. The movie attempts to tell their story in a way to make it appear it is grounded in some sort of modern day Earth reality, but it fails in that respect and badly at that.
If you seek a good action packed, popcorn, alien invasion flick then this works. It was a good watch, but at the same time I laughed a lot out loud at the absurdity of the science being thrown out there and it is supposed to be grounded in a modern Earth civilization. They just brush over creating artificial wormholes and time travel.
However, how they actually explained how the time travel worked, would have been a nice little thing to dig a little deeper in. Without getting crazy technical and sending you all to more YouTube videos, they explain time travel that they created or don’t explain it as there is a whole separate story as to what is actually happening at this point.
The way it works is they flip the switch on their prototype time machine in present day and then the future can travel back to the time period where the machine was switched on. So in that respect they are trying to ground time travel in a plausible reality.
This is currently the more popular form of time travel in popular culture over saying their time travel has something to do with FTL travel or a MacGuffin – an object, device, or event that is convenient and necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters to get to the next level of their story.
At the first moment when the future comes back in time to meet the past is when the machine on present day Earth’s side was switched on. The machine is in the middle of the ocean. Same place on Earth but 30 years apart.
How they just brushed over this with just a few fragments of exposition dialog is what started the laughter for me. Didn’t ruin the movie, but it was a big deal for me. One of the main reasons why this ruined the movie for me was all the other things that happened to Future Earth.
They say there were around 500,000 humans left on the whole planet, yet their technology is roughly the same, no real advancements. As far as weapons go, machine guns were still used and slightly better than our own current technology. That does make sense, but it doesn’t fit “that” nicely.
Future Earth has very limited knowledge about their enemy, where they came from and how they were able to overrun all of Earth, by foot, no technology, in only a few years.
The weapons they give to the Past Earth Freedom Fighters are basically bows and arrows to fight a fighting force that would have our current technology. The only thing that seemed to work effectively were 50 Cal and bigger.
So to sum up. Earth of 2052, travels back to 2022 to recruit bodies to just throw at the enemy with the hopes that would work. Huh; that was the same approach they took when the invasion first happened the first time and that didn’t work. They state in the film that only 30% of all the soldiers sent to the future returned. So, yeah, that didn’t work. At no time did the past dictate policy.
We humans are one stubborn race. If you think we would just stand there and allow someone else just hand us little tiny bits of data about a future alien invasion and just throw bodies at the problem we would not obey.
Humans of the past would immediately take charge. We would demand both data and technology and from that moment Earth would be building up its defenses for the fight in the future. It would not send people to the future to be killed off like Vietnam.
That would destroy any future as it was from the perspective of the future. This opens up so many paradoxes that my head is already spinning. I did like the movie. It was a good popcorn, shoot’em up alien movie. I’d watch it again. Just don’t expect to get any big brain teasers with the plot.
This movie makes people ask far more questions as to why this could be a possible reality than just enjoying the movie. I thought people bitched about Battleship not making much sense. This is far worse in that respect.
“A Quiet Place Part 2” I thought was much more a cohesive film than “Tomorrow War.” Part 2 starts with a flashback of day 1 of the alien invasion. Where the first film we start and the invasion already happened and we do not know much outside of what is happening in the world outside of this family the first film focuses on. In Part 2 we get a lot more information.
I almost feel like the opening to Part 2 was a deleted scene from the first film. It doesn’t feel forced, it fits nicely, but just feels like it could be from the cutting room floor of the 1st film.
Part 2 is not a clone of the first film. There are 2 main plots going on and the end leaves it open for a 3rd. I will just leave it at that. I enjoyed both Quiet Places. They are good creature feature flicks with plenty of tension and gore. I think the deaf element of the girl and the creatures happen to be blind and use their hearing to track its prey is pretty cool and they still do a lot of that in this one, like the first one.
We only get a glimpse of how low humanity has fallen as how other humans treat other survivors. I wish we could have seen a little more of that, but ultimately we got a pretty good movie here. I would love to see a 3rd film.
“Edge of Tomorrow” I decided to watch this one again because I felt like this and “Tomorrow War” had so much in common. The only thing it was missing was Emily Blunt.
That wasn’t why I watched A Quiet Place Part 2. I wanted to see it because I was a big fan of the 1st film. Once I watched both films, “Edge of Tomorrow” was easy to follow up with those 2 previous films. It’s just a coincidence Emily Blunt was in 2 of the 3 films.
The few science fiction films Tom Cruise has been in over the years. I tend to like. I don’t have a lot of problems with this one. I was so fascinated by the “resetting the day” or “Groundhog Day” of having to relive that one day over and over.
From a GOOGLE search; “There is no number given in the movie. In the book, it was all over after 160 days of Cage reliving everything, and Rita spent 211 (300 in the movie) during her turn.” To me, it seems like a lot more. I would think it would take longer to know all those details about each character in depth that way.
I have seen other data on the subject that suggest Cage was stuck in a loop for 34 years. It’s not really important, but I just find it interesting. I like stuff like this. I was really into “Happy Death Day” and its sequel, but I feel they went too far into the fiction and claiming it being science in the second film.
Some things do not always have to be explained. Actually, they did a good job in “Tomorrow War” when they finally explain how the aliens got to Earth in the first place. So one could explain something, but be vague about it in the explanation and that is fine by me.
It doesn’t always have to be a full explanation. However, why brush over creating artificial wormholes and then try to explain the Aliens’ origins? Sometimes studio heads need to leave movies alone and let the story tellers just tell their story. If they do their job, get this. People will pay money to see your movie. I don’t know, right…
So now the meat and potatoes of why I wrote 2200+ words about Aliens eating humans and time travel being involved.
We have to go back to where I make mention of “conspiracy theorists” thinking what they think about Hollywood; besides Hollywood being pedophiles, rapists and phony human beings. Some will tell you that Hollywood style movies like this are to desensitize “us” to these concepts so that when it really happens humans are used to this so we might be more easily controlled.
I don’t know about all that. I can see it as plausible… Does that make me someone that believes in conspiracies? Not so much. I believe in common sense, logic, critical thinking and the scientific method. If something seems plausible I have to see where that data about said subject originated from.
If it came from Joe Schmo on YouTube, who isn’t a scientist and is making outrageous claims; where are the facts? A fact is generated when the scientific community cannot prove said statement to be wrong/incorrect.
1+1=2… You add 1 of something to another 1 of something, you now have 2 of something. You test that. How many different ways can you test the adding 1 of one something to another 1 of something to get 2 of something is/isn’t correct?
So once you have done all that and the answer is 2, every time. You can now say 1+1=2 is a fact and it is. You cannot say 1+1= anything other than 2…
Granted facts for bigger problems/concepts are not this easy. It isn’t supposed to be. I just wanted to show the process. This simple translation has been lost against the backdrop of “Cancel Culture” and whatever other groups that tend to do this with the dummying down of facts and making fun of groups of people who will have great sense to spread only to be laughed at on national TV because the powers that be want to force their narrative as a fact when in-fact isn’t even close. You cannot just “make-up-a-fact…”
Sure this blog is about movies and movie logic; but you can apply this style of critical thinking to a lot of things in our reality. Don’t let “Cancel Culture” win battles they have no business fighting.
If you believe in something, don’t let someone tell you it isn’t true without a fight and by fighting I mean, thoroughly research it. Not just on Google. Look it up in books. Use real research materials.
Anyways… So from Hollywood’s point of view. We are all gonna die by mutated alien creature thingy monster that want to eat us.
Heyyyyyyyy…
So how did they build ships to get here? Did they have FTL travel? If they are literally creature monsters. How did they use tools and make technology? It’s ok to make movies like this. They are fun and sometimes really good. I actually enjoyed watching all 3 of these.
Just the story details cannot just be MacGuffins and expect me not to get lost when I want to know the hows/whys in a story.
What are some of your favorite Alien invasion films? My actual personal favorite is John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982). To me, a paranoid, shapeshifting alien that cannot just copy a human, but absorb the body, the mind, memory, fantasies of the victim is terrifying.
An alien that eats you by absorption and becomes something only from your imagination. Be it from a nightmare, a movie you saw. Perhaps a combination of things you saw for real and imagined.
Even the Borg, Predator, Jason, Freddy, a Terminator (any model), Neo would have an issue fighting a “Thing.”
All butt probes aside. Hollywood wants people to believe Aliens are coming to Eat us. We better invent Time Travel to save the day. Ha… If I could time travel I’d be outta here. Not sure when. Probably somewhere in the past where I can live and let live with minimal praying to a being that may not exist.
“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” Doc Brown, Back to the Future 1985…