“Edge of Tomorrow” starts with scattered flashes of cable news quickly informing us that aliens have invaded the Earth, Europe has been ravished and the rest of humanity is next. Tom Cruise shows up as a talking head on panel after panel and assures the anchors that this latest human assault will be a success.
Why should a sci-fi action movie start this way? Because Director Doug Liman knows that we go through this song and dance over and over again, and every time, nothing seems to get better.
“Edge of Tomorrow” is a smarter and more deeply profound thriller than anyone will give it credit for. Despite the on the face similarities to “Groundhog Day,” (or better yet “Source Code”, which everyone seems to have forgotten) the film has a clever sci-fi conceit that introduces daring wit, drama and romance into a genre in desperate need of more.
Liman makes the grim fear of death an ever-constant reminder, he amplifies the loss of hope, change and progress as a disturbing reality of life, and he only offers us victory at the price of apathy. And yet “Edge of Tomorrow” finds humor in the cynicism and color in the pitiful. For every elaborate set piece of World War II destruction there’s relief inside a deserted barn or a hospital bed. For every CGI monster there’s a supporting character with personality and charm.
And performing that balancing act best of all is Tom Cruise as Major Will Cage in what is his finest performance in a decade. He begins the movie as a smooth talking coward, a PR man to promote the war effort, and transforms himself over the course of the film to not just be an action star but really the only movie star capable of holding down a film of this scope.
When Cage tries to weasel his way out of reporting at the frontline of the human invasion, he’s arrested and labeled a deserter ready to be thrown into battle free of any combat training inside the human’s hulking, mechanized walkers. It’s a cruel fate, but crueler yet is that the invasion is a slaughter. The tentacled, burrowing organisms called Mimics seem to know the humans were coming, and when Cage manages to kill one of the giant, wolf-like beasties, he wakes up back on his Forward Operating Base like it was some horrible dream.
Cage’s fate is that he’s stuck living the same day, a side effect of the Mimics’ blood. And the only person who believes his crazed pleas is Rita (Emily Blunt), a cold, blunt, badass babe who “suffered” the same condition at the hand of the Mimics and used it to win a previous battle, earning her two nicknames, The Angel of Verdun and the more colloquial Full Metal Bitch.
Rita kills Cage over and over again until he can get through training and learn each of the Mimic surprises so that they can make their way off the beach and end the battle remotely.
It would seem to be horribly repetitive, but Liman edits between each new day in a blink, nothing more than a simple shot-replace. He could’ve thrown together some graphic or particular shot to serve as a reminder of each new life, but “Edge of Tomorrow” attains such a rhythm and energy as a result of the editing’s economy. He squeezes comic timing into each pull of the trigger and each recycled line of dialogue. The entire film is fast, punchy and procedural and never as familiar as you’d expect.
And although the screenplay punched up by Christopher McQuarrie (“Jack Reacher”) feels the most daring, there’s an unspoken depth to Cage’s fate that Liman injects throughout the giant moments of chaos. Cage feels so taken with his partner Rita not just out of habit but out of having to see her die time and again along the journey. When they make their way off the battlefield to a safe haven, the movie pulls a fast one by revealing we don’t truly know how many times Cage has had to live this day. We’ve seen the whole film through his perspective, and now suddenly he’s gotten ahead of us and left us to wonder the extent of his curse and his pain.
“Edge of Tomorrow” is a film of metaphors as much as it is a film of monsters and CGI maelstrom. It’s bleak and sharp and cynical to the never-changing routine of life. In a way it calls back to all the blockbusters of this summer and past, from the heavy sci-fi plotting of Cruise’s own “Oblivion” up through the military obsessed visuals of “Godzilla.”
We think we’ve all been here before, and in one respect we have, but like its hero, “Edge of Tomorrow” is a few steps ahead and provides us something fresh at each new look.
3 ½ stars
It’s a movie with a gimmick we’ve seen before, but it’s still done well enough here that it’s fun and hardly ever a distraction. Good review.