I didn’t expect The Tomorrow War to hit me like it did.
I watched it on a rainy Saturday night, the kind where you’re curled up with a blanket and a sense that you’re not quite anchored to reality. I was just looking for some popcorn sci-fi—alien mayhem, heroic slow-motion shots, maybe Chris Pratt flexing a few dad muscles. And sure, I got all that. But I also walked away with a weird, melancholic echo in my chest. That kind of ache you feel when you think about time—what it takes, what it gives back, and who gets remembered.
And oddly enough, it all began with a tuberculosis cure.
Vaccines, Antibiotics, and Unintentional Foreshadowing
There’s a brief but fascinating mention early on in The Tomorrow War about tuberculosis, in a moment that blends science education with childlike wonder. During a quiet flashback, young Muri Forester, watching soccer with her father Dan, asks:
“Do you know who Selman Waksman is?”
She then proudly explains that he discovered a cure for tuberculosis — from dirt and poop. It's gross, funny, and surprisingly accurate.
Selman Waksman was a Ukrainian-born American microbiologist who, in 1943, discovered streptomycin, the first antibiotic that effectively treated Mycobacterium tuberculosis — the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis. The antibiotic was isolated from a species of soil bacteria, Streptomyces griseus. This groundbreaking discovery earned Waksman the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1952.
So while kids may summarize it as "poop and dirt," the real miracle was born from earth — from the invisible microbial world beneath our feet. And in The Tomorrow War, that line becomes beautiful foreshadowing: the future might depend on our understanding of the past.
The scene also shows Muri’s early passion for science and reverence for discovery — a seed that blossoms into her adult identity as a molecular biologist fighting to save humanity. She doesn’t just inherit her father’s stubbornness; she inherits Waksman’s wonder.
Colonel Muri Forester and the Legacy of Immunity
As the story unfolds, Dan Forester is drafted into a future war where he meets his daughter, Colonel Muri Forester, now a brilliant military scientist. She's not just fighting aliens—she's trying to rewrite the future by engineering a toxin that can target the alien reproductive queens.
This is where the connection deepens. Much like Waksman harnessed the power of soil microbes to fight disease, Muri and her team use biochemistry to find a way to kill the Whitespikes from within. The solution isn't brute force—it's molecular. It's microscopic. It's rooted in understanding biology deeply and creatively.
Her toxin acts like a tailored antibiotic for an alien species — a weapon born not from technology, but from cellular understanding. It’s a powerful tribute to how science, often underestimated, can shift the balance of survival.
Time Travel as Trauma
Unlike Back to the Future, where time travel is whimsical and slightly incest-adjacent, or Looper, where it’s gritty and wrapped up in philosophical questions about fate and identity, The Tomorrow War uses time travel as a trauma delivery mechanism.
There’s no real joy in jumping through time here. No hoverboards or charming paradoxes. Just dread. The future comes screaming into the present like a wound, like a warning. Draft notices for people who’ve never held a gun. Mothers leaving children. Scientists dragged into battlefields instead of labs.
It reminded me, more than anything, of Edge of Tomorrow—that underrated gem where Tom Cruise dies over and over again. But even there, there was the dark comedy of repetition, the joy of gaming the system. In The Tomorrow War, once you leave, there’s no checkpoint. No redo. Just pain.
And yet, like in Edge of Tomorrow, knowledge is power. Rewriting the ending depends not on brute force but on understanding. In both films, science saves the day—not bullets.
The Haunting Beauty of a Forgotten Future
What lingered with me the most, long after the aliens were vaporized and the timelines resolved, was the emotional undercurrent: What if your child becomes a stranger? What if the future forgets you, even as it depends on you?
Chris Pratt’s character isn’t just a soldier or scientist; he’s a father. When he travels forward, he meets the grown-up version of his daughter, hardened by loss, scarred by absence. That moment—when your legacy looks back at you not with gratitude, but with pain—is devastating.
Where Back to the Future treats parental encounters as charming surprises, and Looper weaponizes them into violent confrontations, The Tomorrow War offers something rarer: a grieving reconciliation. It’s not about changing the past or saving your younger self. It’s about realizing that who you become might hurt the people you love, even if you had the best intentions.
What Tomorrow Asks of Us Today
I don’t know why Muri’s line about Waksman got to me so much. Maybe because, post-pandemic, we’ve all become amateur microbiologists. Or maybe because it was a reminder that no technology—no matter how advanced—can replace human resilience and memory.
In the end, The Tomorrow War isn’t about aliens or explosions or even time travel. It’s about the burdens we pass down and the choices we make to break the cycle.
It’s about showing up—for your future, for your daughter, for your planet—even if no one in the future remembers your name.
Because some wars aren’t about winning. They’re about remembering who you are when everything around you wants you to forget.
Have you watched The Tomorrow War? Did the Selman Waksman reference catch your eye too? Or did it slip past you like time itself? Leave a comment and tell me how your future is holding up.
Tags: sci-fi, time travel, movie review, The Tomorrow War, Selman Waksman, streptomycin, tuberculosis, Chris Pratt, Back to the Future, Edge of Tomorrow, Looper, science in film
Reference: Wikipedia – Selman Waksman
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