WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for The Tomorrow War, now available on Amazon Prime, and F9, now in theaters.
The Fast and Furious movies are well-known for their ridiculous, over-the-top endings, so it wasn't really a huge surprise when the climax to 2021's F9 featured two of its leads going to space. It seemed as if that would be the most ridiculous ending to an action movie all year, but that assumption was challenged by The Tomorrow War.
The Tomorrow War's main conflict revolves around Dan Forester and a number of other citizens being drafted to fight in a war against a group of aliens called the White Spikes. Using a device called the Jump-Link, the recruits are transported to the year 2051 for seven days at a time before being returned to 2022. They can only travel between 2022 and 2051, with no exceptions due to the Jump-Link being an unstable device.
Dan has quite a week in the future. He meets the future version of his daughter Muri, who is one of the leaders of the future military, and has a number of close encounters with the White Spikes. During a climactic battle with the White Spikes, who are threatening to overrun the Jump-Link device, Muri creates a toxin that will kill the aliens and gives it to Dan. He is sent back to 2022 shortly afterward, with Muri sacrificing her life to ensure his survival.
Right after Dan returns to his time, it is revealed that the Jump-Link was destroyed in the future and is now unusable. Due to this, the toxin can't be mass-produced and sent to the future. The recruits are allowed to return to their lives without any sort of debrief, as the military doesn't seem to recognize the importance of the toxin. They keep it locked up instead of manufacturing more of it for use against the aliens. The Tomorrow War brushes this off by saying the military wants to focus on problems in the present, but it's a certainty that the aliens will attack at some point, so one would think the government would want to be ready for that.
After coming back home, Dan and his wife, Emmy, begin to discuss the White Spikes. Due to the fact that no surveillance evidence of the White Spikes coming to Earth exists, Dan and Emmy conclude they must have arrived on Earth before anyone realized in the span of one conversation. Here, they figure out more about the aliens than the past and future's military leaders combined.
The Tomorrow War's climax is then kicked off by a conversation about volcanoes, and the team learns that the White Spikes are frozen in Arctic Russia and will be freed because of global warming. Dan convinces his estranged father, James, who happens to have a plane, to fly them there in an unauthorized military operation. He also manages to acquire some vials of the toxin from Lieutenant Hart, and the government has only created about two briefcases worth of it.
Things start to get wild when the group touches down in Russia. They locate the glacier that the White Spikes are frozen in and use a bunch of explosives to blow an entryway into it. Once inside, the team kill some of the hibernating White Spikes with the toxin, only for several others to wake up and begin to chase them.
This leads to a no-holds-barred action scene, which includes a ridiculous moment where the film's comic relief, Charlie, protects James by killing a White Spike with a buzzsaw. All but one of the creatures are blown up, and the remaining one is tricked into attacking a snowman -- complete with smiley face -- wearing James' jacket.
Dan and James fight the alien, first using guns and then resorting to using their climbing tools as melee weapons. James attempts to sacrifice himself to kill the monster, but Dan jumps on its back as it charges toward his father, cutting its throat and finally killing it with a vial of toxin.
Aside from the potential time paradoxes it causes, The Tomorrow War's ending is just plain over-the-top and ridiculous. The sight of Chris Pratt and J.K. Simmons using climbing tools to engage in a brawl with an alien just may be enough to top Roman and Tej's trip to space as 2021's most absurd movie ending.
Starring Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, Sam Richardson, Betty Gilpin, J.K. Simmons and Edwin Hodge, The Tomorrow War is now available on Amazon Prime.