★★★
This is a fun summer movie.
We have sci-fi action Tom Cruise again, but this year it’s fun watching
him play against type. Rather than the
in-control hero we’re used to, he starts as a man of little courage who
grows into the role of hero through a series of time reboots that give him the opportunity to hone his combat skills. He repeatedly goes into battle against the alien Mimics, gets killed, and restarts the day in J-Squad on the morning of the invasion he is to fight in. In addition to building his fighting skills, he picks up a love interest,
Rose Vrataski, who has previously had the time reboot power, and Dr. Carter, a
scientist who is trying to figure out what is happening.
Edge of Tomorrow is a fun action thriller though most of its
run. The repeated scenes of the human counter attack on the beach echo the Normandy opening of Saving Private Ryan, except here we
get lots of laser beams, slashing robotic tentacles and ugly, nimble aliens all
jammed into the battle. And Doug Liman takes
the film beyond the beach landing on a romp to Paris to discover the Omega alien hidden away in the basement of the Louvre. It's all fun.
Another point of interest here is watching the same
series of events repeated with each reboot.
We experience most of the detail of first day as we run follow Major Cage's activities, but Liman then removes
and tweeks details with each retelling to get Major Cage further into the
action. There’re more than a little fun
in watching the witty interplay between the action of the current iteration of
events and our experience of the first and other versions. This technique is a clever and engaging use of the time
travel trope.
Which is not to say that Edge of Tomorrow is without
problems. The most limiting element of
the film is that the rules of its universe are so complicated that we’re left
with lots of exposition and can still be confused about how or why something is
happening. To feel that the ending of
the film isn’t a cheat, for example, it’s important to know that the killing of
an Alpha would reset time and that Cage couldn’t come back to try to kill the
Omega if that happened. This isn’t an
intuitive element of the film, and it's the kind of detail that the audience has to pick up on among all the SFX. The main drawback to the film is that Edge of
Tomorrow has a complicated set of alternative-universe rules that are as
central to the action as they are byzantine.
But for those of us wanting a sci-fi action thrill with lots
of special effects and a dribble of a love story, Edge of Tomorrow is
perfect. And for the true sci fi aficionados,
the film has also offers a layer of concept.
