The last time we saw Tom Cruise starring in a big budget summer movie, it was in the sci-fi mind-bender Oblivion, which was pretty to look at and featured the usual rock solid star turn from Cruise, but which caught a lot of flack for being a hodgepodge of science fiction conceits that had already been presented in other, better films. With his new project, Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise sees himself once again starring in a pastiche film that has melded together ideas from other genre works, only this time, under the watch of director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), he sees much better results.
This time around Cruise is playing a prissy bureaucrat named Cage who circumstances have put in the middle of a D-Day-type invasion of Europe meant to stop the spread of an alien threat that has taken over most of the continent and is about to advance on London. Alien invaders aren’t the only crazy thing going on here though. A freak occurrence during the battle also sees Cage gaining the ability to go back in time to the morning before the invasion every time he dies, effectively creating a time loop where he goes to war, gets killed, and wakes up ready to be sent off to war all over again, again and again. His only chance to move forward seems to be to keep dying over and over again until he can somehow figure out a way to save the doomed invasion and defeat the alien threat who has them so vastly outnumbered, by using the advantage of extreme trial and error. The bad news about that is that it sucks to get killed over and over again, but the good news is that an infamously badass warrior named Rita (Emily Blunt) seems to have some answers to what exactly has happened to Cage, and she may just be able to help him kill all the aliens, end the time loop he finds himself stuck in, and save what’s left of the world in the process.
The script Cruise and Liman are working from (which is credited to the trio of Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth) is an adaptation of a graphic novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka called ‘All You Need is Kill.’ Sakurazaka’s story is one that combines the death and rebirth time loop conceit of things like Groundhog Day and Source Code with the alien invasion battle strategy conceit of things like Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers with the exo-skeleton-enhanced-soldier conceit that’s most recently been seen in things like GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Elysium. That’s a lot of geeky stuff to pack into one movie, so one might worry that Edge of Tomorrow would come off as even more of a patchwork than Oblivion (which combined various conceits from works like Moon, Wall-E, and Predator) did, but the good news here is that everything fits together nicely enough to ad up to an action movie that’s entertaining to watch, if not wholly original.
One of the big reasons for that success is the film’s pacing. While Edge of Tomorrow unfolds out in front of you, it feels like it could very easily be broken up into chapters, with each chapter flowing smoothly into the next. Despite the fact that there is repetition inherent in the story being told, you never feel like the characters are doing the same thing over and over again. Just when you’re maybe going to start tiring of a training montage, or a sequence where Cage continuously tries to figure out how to get out of a particular situation without dying, the focus shifts, a new challenge is put in front of him, and the plot keeps moving forward.
You don’t get beat over the head with the action either. There’s a decent chunk of movie you have to get through before you even catch a glimpse of the alien attacker that’s put the plot into motion, and your curiosity around what they are and the build to their reveal are some of the main things that keeps the first act engaging. Even when the time loop gimmick kicks in and you’re repeatedly thrown into the middle of this huge battle, the movie never loses structure though. What you’re seeing on the screen is always there for a reason. Though there’s plenty of action to feast your eyes on throughout the film, the story never stops so that massive destruction and special effects can be put on display, just for the sake of putting them on display. Seeing as what a problem that sort of disaster porn approach has been for so many modern blockbusters, it feels like we’re getting a nice little vacation here by watching a movie where it’s finally not the case. Action sequences become thrilling based on how much we care about the characters involved and how interested we are in the consequences of their results, not on the scale of their destruction.
The place where the writing falters a little bit is in the dialogue. The exposition scenes get out-of-control-dense, some of what’s said just sounds clunky coming out of the actors’ mouths—especially the tough guy stuff that the soldiers are constantly spouting—and because we have to hear a lot of it over and over again, it tends to just get clunkier and clunkier as the movie goes on. This is where you fully realize what a masterful feat of writing Groundhog Day really was. Nothing in that movie felt poorly written. It trusted its audience enough to not have to explain everything to them, and, if anything, the repeated dialogue just got funnier and more layered with meaning every time you heard it. Remarkable. That’s not to say that Edge of Tomorrow is completely without its charms though. It actually does manage to mine its death and rebirth angle for some effective dark humor, Groundhog Day-style, a time or two, which is another thing that puts it a step above the usual crop of summer blockbusters that fail to live up to expectations—when it’s trying to be funny, it actually succeeds.
It’s that focus on being entertaining that shines through and allows Edge of Tomorrow to be a strong enough effort to be recommended. Like Oblivion, it spends a lot of its time exploring ideas that have already been explored in other movies, but unlike that movie the ideas aren’t being put front and center. Here the action and the humor is what’s taking center stage, while the various genre tropes that get stitched together serve merely as a vehicle for Cruise to do his big-shot movie star thing. Which, say what you will about him, you have to admit he’s good at. He’s got a lot of star power to lean back on, but you still never catch him leaning. He always throws himself fully into every aspect of every role he takes, and that’s also the case here. Add in Blunt trading in her usual warmth and fragile beauty to show some range as a steely badass and Bill Paxton clearly having a ton of fun playing an unapologetically Bill Paxton-esque character, and there’s enough good stuff here to make Edge of Tomorrow worth a portion of your summer movie budget—even if under all those sci-fi bells and whistles it really is mostly just a goofy shoot ‘em up. That’s fine. The world needs more goofy shoot ‘em ups that are actually done well.
