The Tomorrow War is a 2021 American military science fiction action film directed by Chris McKay, written by Zach Dean, and starring Chris Pratt.

In December 2022, biology teacher and former Green Beret Dan Forester is disappointed after failing to get a job at the Army Research Laboratory. 

Later, during the internationally televised World Cup, soldiers from the year 2051 arrive on the pitch via a time portal.

 They announce that in November 2048, aliens called White Spikes suddenly appeared in northern Russia and had wiped out most humans within a span of just three years. 

The world of the present-day sends their militaries into the future through a wormhole device, but fewer than 30% survive their seven-day deployment, prompting an international draft. 

Dan receives a draft notice and is fitted with a temporal armband to track him and pull him back if he is alive at the end of his seven days.

The draftees are sent forward in time to a battlefield on Miami Beach, where their commander orders them to rescue nearby lab personnel before sterilizing the area. 

The draftees find that all the lab personnel are dead, but recover their research.

Only Dan survives the firebombing with two fellow draftees, a scientist named Charlie and a draftee named Dorian, who is on his third deployment.

Dan awakens in a military encampment in the Dominican Republic overseen by his daughter Muri as Colonel. 

Muri tells Dan there is a toxin that kills male White Spikes, but not the female queens, and asks for his help in capturing a female White Spike to refine the toxin to be fatal to them.

She also tells Dan that in the past, he became disillusioned after failing to get his research job, divorced his wife Emmy, and died in a car crash when Muri was sixteen.

They capture a female White Spike but are attacked by hundreds of males and narrowly escape by helicopter to DEEPSWELL-9, a fortified offshore oil platform 25 miles east of Port Nelson.

Muri succeeds in developing a toxin lethal to female White Spikes, but it cannot be mass-produced in that time period, so she asks Dan to take it into the past to produce it there and prevent the war.

However, the base is overrun by male white spikes in a coordinated effort to protect their queen, causing Muri to sacrifice herself to return Dan to the past.

This then creates a paradox causing the wormhole to close, which the world takes as a sign that the war will inevitably be lost.

Dan and Emmy later infer that the White Spikes arrived on Earth much earlier than 2048 as there was never a record of their ship arriving. 

After finding volcanic ash on an alien's spike, Dan and Charlie consult with Dan's student, Martin, an amateur volcanologist. 

It is determined that the White Spikes have likely been on Earth at least since the "Millennium Eruption" in 946 AD. 

Dan leads a mission to Russia with Charlie, Dorian, stranded future soldiers, and his estranged father James, a veteran of the Vietnam War.

They find the alien ship frozen in ice beneath the Academy of Sciences Glacier, and surmise that global warming may have freed them in the future. 

The frozen bodies of another, more humanlike alien species are also found on board, causing the group to deduce that the Ship had crash-landed on Earth.

The White Spikes were bred to help wipe the native population off a planet in order to make way for the more intelligent beings.

They then inject the lethal toxin into several White Spikes who have been in a state of hypersleep, but this then awakens the rest of the colony who begin to attack the group. 

Queen White Spike eventually awakens as well and escapes. Dorian, terminally ill with cancer, stays behind and blows up the ship while Dan and James pursue the queen.

After a fierce fight, Dan shoves the lethal toxin into the queen's mouth and pushes her off a cliff, to her death.

Content knowing that the war is averted and humanity is saved, Dan brings James home to meet Emmy and Muri, and is determined to avoid the same mistakes that the future Muri warned him about.