Could Invent Time Travel, but Not Figure Out Whitespike Earth Origin Point?
While plot holes and just "huh??"s reign in this movie, I was thinking after finishing it, why these 500,000 people in the future, who are obviously the brightest (most anyway) to have survived (either protected by the government while everyone else was torn to shreds, or had survival smarts) couldn't figure out a better plan to change this alien invasion from ever happening?
While you're lead to think the premise of the time travelers was to recruit people from our time to go fight their battle, we do learn that they just need people to help find a solution to stop the aliens when they do first land & rise up, thus our first "huh? why not just stay in the present and prevent it?" is what they want to do.
But my problem is, if they are smart (invented time travel after all and were able to build the time machine), have helicopters which, if they didn't fly so slow, can't get attacked by the whitespikes, not find the landing place of the aliens themselves? If the ice has truly melted as the student's ice melting prediction video showed, they would have found the ship in northern Russia even sooner than the finding-an-ice-cube-in-the-artic present day team did. They knew it had to be North Russia. Even if the whitespikes had been dropped off to kill us all, there would be some sort of cavity or mass amount of tracks to show their origin in the snow/mud.
Then, once they have pinpointed the start of the alien invasion, just go back in time to wait on that island, which would then interfere less with earth's original timeline. Of course then our main character probably still would have gone on to leave his family and die, but oh well. If they had come back and gone to that place, even in 2040, they would have found the ship like in the movie and could have disposed of it.
Oh well, just my rambling thoughts after seeing the flick. I know, if that had been how it happened, not much of a movie...