EDGE OF TOMORROW

Edge of Tomorrow

Grade: A-

Starring: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson and Noah Taylor

Premise: A military officer re-living the day of a massive battle again and again struggles to learn how to save his doomed comrades from an advanced alien race.

Rated PG-13 for intense action and violence, language, blood, and some disturbing images

For what is believed to have been as much as 30-plus years, Bill Murray’s weatherman Phil Connors awoke in a hotel room to the chipper sounds of Sonny & Cher on the radio, singing “I Got You Babe”. It always let him know that, sure enough, it was once again Groundhog Day. In the new sci-fi action epic Edge of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise’s William Cage can only wish he woke up in a hotel room. Each day he wakes on an airport runway, almost immediately snatched up and chewed out by a blustering master sergeant who mistakes him for a low-ranking enlisted man and plugs him into one of the squads leading the way for a massive invasion of mainland France. Within 24 hours, he’s in a troop-carrying aircraft, which explodes in mid-air before even making it to the beach where the troops are set to deploy, to try and fight the advanced alien race that has conquered large portions of the world. The attack, which was supposed to be a surprise, almost instantly fails. Along with the others, Cage dies a horrible death. But Cage knows he will wake again on that runway, but no matter how much advance knowledge he gives anyone, he can’t stop the attack, can’t stop the slaughter, and can’t stop himself from finding his way back to that runway again, so he can wake up and do it again.

It hits theaters with less than half the advance buzz of recent titles like X-Men, Godzilla and The Amazing Spiderman, but Edge of Tomorrow borders on outright brilliant. With a killer central premise, this movie—part Groundhog Day, part Starship Troopers, part something all its own—is can’t-look-away type-stuff. It’s got terrific visuals, balls-to-the-wall action, an intriguing coming-into-his-own arc for the main character, and perfectly-suited existentialist is-it-all-even-worth-it undertones. Sorry, that’s a lot of hyphens; I was exhausted when I watched Edge of Tomorrow late last night (I might have nodded off during a lesser movie), so I’m rather struggling to really describe it, but needless to say, this was my favorite movie of the summer so far, a dazzling blockbuster that made me go “hell yeah—this is freakin’ awesome!”

Plot

It’s believed the Mimics came to Earth via meteors, but that’s about all any human can almost be sure of. The fast-moving, clawed and tentacled monsters have quickly overrun nearly half the planet, proving nearly invincible against even heavy weapons. But when humanity wins a surprise victory at Verdun and the heads of the United Defense Force see an opportunity to raise morale—put a few likeable heroes at the head of the big invasion of mainland France, which is sure to be another great victory—it puts Major William Cage (Cruise) in the crosshairs. A winking, smiling PR man who looks confident but is terrified at the very idea of actual warfare, Cage refuses UDF commander General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) on the spot at the idea of being the face of the new invasion, with a camera crew following his every move as his lands with the first wave. Orders are orders, but Cage doesn’t like them—he tries to run, but is caught and sedated and then, it appears, thrown under the bus. He wakes on Heathrow Airport’s runway in handcuffs with no identification, and no one believing he’s a high-ranking officer. Forget a camera crew—what he has now is Master Sergeant Farell (Bill Paxton) brandishing a note that says he’s a deserter and a lowly enlisted man. Next thing “Private Cage” knows, he’s been stuck with a squad of unfriendly, unhelpful grunts, packed into the high-tech, gun-toting futuristic suits the troops wear, and marched onto a carrier craft headed for the coast of France.

*Is it a coincidence a movie that centers on a massive invasion of conquered mainland France came out on the 70^th anniversary of D-Day? I doubt it.*

The Mimics, it seemed, knew this “surprise attack” was coming. Many of the troop-carrying craft don’t even make it to the beach, and those troops that manage to stagger out of the wreckage-filled waves (Cage among them) are greeted by mayhem, explosions, and the whirling dervish aliens that make short work of them. Not even able to work his armored suit’s guns at first, Cage actually manages to kill a mimic with an explosive, but it detonates too close, mangling his body. But he doesn’t even die (or does he?) before he wakes on the runway again, gets chewed out again, and gets thrown into rotation again. The craft explodes again, he makes the beach again, he dies again. The one advantage of the recurring time warp is that he learns when and where the Mimics will attack, allowing him to progress further each time. His progression soon leads him to cross paths with Rita (Emily Blunt), the Special Ops dynamo who spearheaded the victory at Verdun. She, apparently, had the same thing happen to her as has happened to Cage—she could relive the day, allowing her to strategize and counter the Mimics. Pairing her top-notch skills with his improving ones, they’re able to progress through the beach, and, with a tip from a disgraced military scientist (Noah Taylor), they begin to figure out how they could save the invasion force, and maybe kill off the Mimics for good. But the Mimics are deadly and fast, and Cage is all too-human, and the slightest miscalculation means dying—and starting all over from that runway.

What Works?

Despite their previous merits, each of last month’s big blockbusters had at least a minor stumble. X-Men: Days of Future Past was a little too talky. Godzilla was way too talky and almost forgot to show Godzilla do anything cool. The Amazing Spiderman 2 had too many plot threads and too much drama, and spent so much time building its story that it stuck both of its major villains in the same rushed climactic action scene. Edge of Tomorrow is almost perfectly-balanced: it never forgets it’s a sci-fi action extravaganza, of course, but it’s got a little mystery, a little humor, and a little heart. Directed by Doug Liman, who directed the first and deepest of the Bourne movies, and co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, who won an Oscar for penning the still-legendary original screenplay for The Usual Suspects, Tomorrow manages to make you feel the weariness of Cage’s plight. Each day, he wakes, he’s chewed out, he’s by turns neglected and pushed around, he trains, he lands on the beach, and he fights. No matter how admirable he becomes in battle, if he’s cornered or badly injured, there’s nothing for it but to die again. As was the case in Groundhog Day, the montage of Cage dying in many different ways provokes a sort of perverse laughter, but you do begin to feel the weight and the misery of the ordeal. That said, this isn’t Shakespeare—there’s some terrific, pedal-to-the-metal action, and it goes right up to the finish.

This is Cruise’s best role in years, mainly because it’s not really a Movie Star part. Cruise brought the charisma and heroism in last year’s Oblivion, but what with the Cruise clones, it just screamed Movie Star Flick. His two big 2012 roles didn’t help either—people don’t want to see this over-exposed movie star play a near-mythic, crime-fighting lady-killer (Jack Reacher) or a preening sex-god rock star (Rock of Ages). Here, he could just be another guy: the fact that he’s thrust into a situation where no one gives him any respect and he has to work from the ground up helps—we can root for an underdog (remember Jerry Maguire?). Blunt is solid, too, as the tough-talking, pistol-packing Rita, and Bill Paxton elicits hoots as the blustering, cliché-spouting master sergeant who’s this movie’s answer to Ned Ryierson, the dorky insurance agent Phil Connors kept re-encountering in Groundhog Day.

What Doesn’t Work?

Tomorrow does a lot of things right, as I’ve mentioned. The battle scenes on the beach get a little hard-to-follow, whether it’s because the Mimics move so quickly or because the scenes are suffused with so much CGI, but that’s really my only complaint other than wanting to see what happened next, after the ending scene.

Content

This is PG-13, so most of the violence isn’t super bloody, but a lot of people get killed off in a lot of different ways in this one, and there are explosions and crashes and collapses aplenty. The rather light, reversible way death is treated in this movie might rub some people the wrong way as well. And, typically, because this movie takes place entirely around soldiers, there are plenty of cuss words.

Bottom Line

A thrilling, balanced action flick with a cool premise and a "have-you-seen-this-before" energy, Edge of Tomorrow is a great movie and one I definitely want to see again.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Directed by Doug Liman

Screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth

Based on the novel “All You Need Is Kill” by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Rated PG-13

Length: 113 minutes