The Tomorrow War Proves An Alien War Movie On Earth Could Work
The Tomorrow War’s success has proven that an Alien sequel set on Earth could work, provided the proposed installment learns from both the franchise’s earlier mistakes and this recent blockbuster. The Tomorrow War is an action-thriller that sees a group of soldiers arrive on earth from the future with a warning. Three decades from now, alien forces are waging and winning a war on humanity, forcing the military to recruit human soldiers from the past to fight.
The Tomorrow War has received mixed reviews, but what some sci-fi viewers may not know is that the movie is similar to a proposed Alien sequel that never came to fruition. Thanks to a misleading trailer, many viewers watching 1990’s dark horror sequel Alien 3 arrived in cinemas expecting a "Xenomorphs Vs Humans" face-off set on earth. This is a promise that the franchise still has not fulfilled, and one that The Tomorrow War proves that the Alien series could still pull off.
Although the sci-fi thriller is imperfect as proven by the movie’s mixed critical feedback, The Tomorrow War is in many ways the sequel audiences expected Alien 3 to be back in the early 1990s. Despite its shortcomings, The Tomorrow War's action proves that a full-on war movie with Xenomorphs on Earth could work now, tamping down the siege horror aspects of Alien and Alien 3 in favor of a bigger-scale, action-heavier approach like Aliens. Although the Xenomorph did technically arrive on earth in both Alien Vs Predator and Alien Vs Predator: Requiem, neither provided Aliens-style fights with an army of Xenomorphs in the manner that The Tomorrow War’s successfully staged showdowns between masses of aliens and human soldiers did.
After The Terminator director James Cameron took over the Alien franchise from Blade Runner helmer Ridley Scott in 1986, the helmer made a canny decision whose success the series has not yet been able to replicate. By adding an “s” at the end of the movie’s title and multiplying the titular threat, Cameron turned the Alien franchise from a self-contained sci-fi slasher into an expansive action-thriller. His sequel introduced far more characters than Scott’s original solely so there would be more cannon fodder to face off against the eponymous monsters, and making the cast well-armed marines rather than space truckers made the movie’s plot a more even fight.
When Alien 3 promised Xenomorphs on earth, viewers understandably expected another escalation from Aliens' action and an even bigger, more action-oriented outing from the franchise. Not only did director David Fincher’s Alien 3 fail to live up to its early teaser trailer, which implied the titular threat would land on the human-inhabited planet, the second sequel in the series also decreased the scale of the movies back down to the claustrophobic setting of the original Alien. Despite fans wanting an even bigger, more action-packed sequel, the story of Alien 3 was instead contained to one setting (albeit a slightly bigger one than the first film’s Nostromo), and subsequent sequels and prequels largely followed suit. Even the best Alien prequel, Alien: Covenant, was set on an abandoned planet and a single spaceship rather than venturing anywhere near humanity’s home planet.
The Tomorrow War’s depiction of soldiers fighting waves of near unkillable, hyper-intelligent aliens seemingly designed to wipe out life on the planet proves that an action-oriented, large-scale sequel to the Alien series is not only possible but a great idea. The individual aliens who comprise the movie’s threat may be larger than Xenomorphs, but The Tomorrow War’s killer extraterrestrials are still seen frequently facing off against squadrons of human soldiers in a way that the superficially similar Edge of Tomorrow focuses more on the time-jumping conceit than illustrating its alien threat. The aliens of The Tomorrow War may boast a wider maw and an extra set of legs that separate them from the original Xenomorph design, but the fact that they are (major spoilers follow here) a bioweapon specifically designed to wipe out the population of enemy planets makes them almost identical to the monsters of the Alien franchise. The prequels reveal that the Weyland-Yutani Corporation may have even had a hand in perfecting, if not outright creating, the Xenomorph (the initial design appears to be the fault of the Engineers), making their function as a weapon all but identical to that of the aliens seen throughout The Tomorrow War’s action.
Setting aside the under-utilized Earth setting of the Alien Vs Predator movies, The Tomorrow War shows what a major-scale, blockbuster take on the concept of humans vs Xenomorphs could look like. Where the Alien Vs Predator movies limited their action to one small town and an Antarctic research base, it is now possible to pull off a full-blown war between Xenomorphs and humans on the scale that such a concept deserves. The execution of such a pitch was once limited to the comparatively inexpensive medium of tie-in comics, but advances in CGI and the success of both The Tomorrow War and the A Quiet Place series proves that mainstream audiences want to see fusions of sci-fi, horror, and bigger-scale action set-pieces.
Comic book writer Mark Verheiden's early Dark Horse comics such as Aliens: Outbreak and Aliens: Female War could be a perfect template for such a story, imagining as they do a worldwide war between humans and Xenomorphs that still manages to have a compelling impact on individual characters. In particular, Female Wars, which focuses on Newt and Hicks (like Neil Blomkamp’s lost Alien 5 may have), picks up the story of the characters from Aliens and sets up a planet-wide war without ever dropping the focus on a few compelling central characters already familiar and beloved to fans of the series. While there is no denying that The Tomorrow War has its flaws, the sci-fi thriller’s biggest success was proving that an Alien war movie set on earth could succeed, and the franchise already has the source material to make this pitch an overdue reality in its next installment.
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