Edge of Tomorrow
Live Die Repeat

I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler (even by my broad definition of that term) to reveal the central plot device of Edge of Tomorrow, as one can pretty much guess it from the tag line on the poster, “Live, Die, Repeat.” In this sci-fi action film, set in a not-too-distant-future, Tom Cruise plays a slick military mouthpiece who suddenly finds himself a combat grunt fighting against a seemingly omniscient and unstoppable alien force. After he’s killed within minutes on the battlefield, he wakes up back on the carrier where his adventure began, somehow caught in a time-loop that forces him to relive the same day of battle over and over again. What keeps the picture from being a simple-minded, overblown rehash of the brilliant Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day (1993) is that it does more than just pilfer that film’s ingenious premise and dumb it down for a summer blockbuster. 

Basing their film on the 2004 Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, director Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith), and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie (who wrote Cruise’s 2012 Jack Reacher) and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (who wrote Liman’s 2010 Fair Game) come up with an entertaining shoot-um-up that is both viscerally and intellectually stimulating.  This movie is an engaging and satisfying thrill ride—a rare commodity in today’s wasteland of CGI-laden, destruction-obsessed, story-absent, 3D unspectaculars. The film possesses none of Groundhog Day’s spiritual subtext or comical inventiveness. In fact it’s bereft of anything remotely psychological, and all of the humorous scenes mined from the premise are similar to ones Bill Murray did with greater aplomb in the Ramis film. Yet Edge of Tomorrow puts a fresh spin on the conceit of the endlessly looping day, using conventions of the science-fiction genre as well as those of the mega-summer event movie itself.  Cruise plays one of the only action heroes of the last two decades whose invincibility is actually explained and motivated by the film’s plot. He’s not a bad-ass who never dies despite an impossible number of near misses and unbeatable foes. He’s just a guy who fights the same fight so many times that he knows what his enemies will do and how to vanquish them. In this way, the film mirrors the experience of a first-person-shooter video game, in which the player is killed over and over, but is continuously granted another life and sent back to the beginning of the game to fight with more experience and savvy the next time out. 

The movie’s CGI alien creatures aren’t especially inventive or scary, and its scenes of space-age military life are overly reminiscent of better films, such as James Cameron’s 1986 masterpiece Aliens (of which no sci-fi military movie yet made can escape negative comparisons). But Edge of Tomorrow boasts a trump card in its female lead Emily Blunt. She plays a Special Forces soldier whom Cruise’s character must both win over and learn from in order to complete his mission. Their relationship is a true partnership (unlike Bill Murray’s and Andie MacDowell’s in Groundhog Day), and Blunt’s chemistry with Cruise is nearly as electric as it was with Matt Damon in George Nolfi’s underrated The Adjustment Bureau (2011). The old cliché of a prestige part transforming a big movie star into a legit “actor” is reversed here with this action-oriented role making Blunt, the sensational actress, into a bona fide movie star. After making a name for herself playing icy, cerebral, upper-class Brits in films like My Summer of Love (2004) and The Young Victoria (2009), then showcasing her warm and funny side playing girl’s-next-door in films like My Sister’s Sister and The Five Year Engagement (both 2012), and unexpectedly complex, layered characters in genre pictures like The Adjustment Bureau and Looper (2012), she now embodies a strong, smart, aggressive, female warrior in the Sigourney Weaver/Linda Hamilton vein. Blunt makes Edge of Tomorrow special, but Cruise is also in top form. In this picture, he gives us every version of the Tom Cruise screen persona that has made him one of the most durable stars in film history. We get Cruise the snarky jerk who needs his comeuppance, Cruise the tireless action hero who will practically kill himself to entertain us, and even Cruise the vulnerable and surprisingly nuanced actor. 

Edge of Tomorrow scores because it doesn’t seem overly pleased with itself, like the clever but clumsy time-travel indie Looper (2012). And because it never tries to make us think it’s anything more than a simple popcorn picture, sidestepping the pretentiousness of the insufferable Inception (2010). The movie is also appealingly conscious of the debt it owes to prior, superior films. The smart casting of Bill Paxton as a drill sergeant hangs a lantern on its similarities to Aliens, and naming Blunt’s character Rita, which is Andie MacDowell’s name in Groundhog Day, winks slyly at that film (though the heroine of All You Need Is Kill also has this name, so that homage may originate with Sakurazaka). Most importantly, Edge of Tomorrow delivers new life to a potentially exhausted gimmick, potent enough to sustain an entire feature.