The Tomorrow War

In December 2022, Dan Forester, a biology teacher and former military officer, cannot get a job at a prestigious research center. During the broadcast of the World Cup, soldiers from 2051 arrive at the stadium. They say that in their time, humanity is on the verge of extinction due to a war with alien creatures known as "white-chips", who appeared in November 2048 and killed most of humanity within three years. To help in the fight against aliens, people are sent to the future through a wormhole called "Jumplink", but less than 20% of them return after a seven-day stay in a combat zone.

Dan receives a notification that he has been drafted into the army, and tells his wife about it. She offers to run away and persuades Dan to visit his father – a mechanical engineer named James who lives separately. He wants his father to help him remove the tracking " bug " attached to his arm. Dan's father left his mother and him after he returned from Vietnam, because he felt that he was a threat to them. Dan tells his father that he doesn't want his help, calls him a coward, and then leaves.

Dan goes to the base, where he takes a basic military training course. Together with another conscript named Charlie, they come to the conclusion that in order to avoid time paradoxes, they call only those who died before the war began; those who came from the future were not yet born in their time.

Recruits are sent to the battlefield in Miami Beach, but the wormhole fails and they are thrown high above the city. After a fall from a huge height, few survive. The commander of the troops of the future, Colonel Forester, orders the recruits to rescue the employees of the nearest laboratory before the area around it is cleared from the air. However, it turns out that the laboratory staff is already dead. Dan reports this on the radio, and is told that no help will be sent to rescue the stranded soldiers. Almost all the recruits are killed in the battle with the whitecaps, with the exception of Charlie, Dan and Dorian – a battle-hardened soldier who has already gone on his third trip to the future.

Survivors wake up in a military camp on the territory of the Dominican Republic. Dan finds himself directly subordinate to Colonel Forester, who is his daughter Muri. She asks him to accompany her on a mission to capture a female white-chip, which are much rarer than males. They trap the female in a trap and send her by helicopter to a research center equipped in a fortified oil rig near Port Nelson. Dan and Muri run away from the attacking male whitecaps to the beach. Muri tells Dan that, dissatisfied with his life after losing a promising job, he will leave his family and die in a car accident in 2030.

With the help of the female's blood, Muri creates a toxin that can kill all white-thorns. The aliens attack and take over the base, and Muri sacrifices himself to send Dan back in time with the toxin and prevent the outbreak of war. He returns to 2023 with the toxin, but the "Jumplink"is destroyed in the future, and there is no possibility to go back. The world perceives this information as a sign that the war with the aliens will be lost.

Dan brainstorms with his wife Emmy, and they come to the conclusion that aliens did not appear on Earth in 2048, but much earlier. Dan consults with Charlie and Martin, a high school student interested in volcanoes, and they assume that whitecaps have been on Earth since at least the "Millennium Eruption" in 946. Most likely, they appeared from under the ice caps after the melting of the ice as a result of global warming.

After the US Secretary of Defense refuses to use military resources to confirm their theory, Dan himself leads a mission to Russia, where, according to their calculations, the alien ship lies in the ice. The team discovers a crashed alien ship near the glacier of the Academy of Sciences on Komsomolets Island. Once inside, they realize that the whitecaps are not the aliens themselves, but rather artificially created organisms that may have been used by another alien race as a weapon to clean up the planets. The team injects the toxin into the bodies of several aliens. This kills them, but in their death throes they wake up the rest of the colony.

Dorian, terminally ill with cancer and willing to die on his own terms, stays behind to blow up the ship. The explosion kills all the whitecaps, except for one female. Dan and his father track her down and kill her.

Satisfied that war has been averted and humanity has been saved, Dan brings James home to introduce him to his wife and daughter. He is determined not to make the mistakes that Muri warned him about in her version of the future.