Edge of Tomorrow

I’ll be honest when I first saw the trailer for the Edge of Tomorrow, there was nothing that really reached out and grabbed me. It looked visually interesting, but the way the story was introduced, really didn’t give you anything particularly interesting.  The main plot point of the film is omitted, not in itself a bad thing, but without it, the trailer made the film look like a standard military sci-fi invasion film.

The basic plot of Edge of Tomorrow at first follows William Cage (Cruise) a PR man who has helped to sign up hundreds of thousands of men and women for a kind of D-Day style beach landing. Unbeknownst to him, he is going to the beach as well, to fight with the people he convinced to go there.

The landing goes terribly, thousands are killed, but by killing one of the aliens and being drenched in its blood, Cage inherits its species’ ability to control time and is taken back twenty four hours. Every time he is sent to the beach, he dies. Every time he dies, he wakes up twenty-four hours earlier.

This is a relatively new kind of role for Cruise, here he is definitely a man who is so far out of his depth, for the first half an hour, he looks completely lost and is just meat to get torn up and sent back. His confidence and charm does return towards the end of the film though, as his skills increase. It is in the first half of the film that his best work is done, he is vulnerable, scared and desperate to somehow get rid of this mind destroying curse.

Without going into spoilers, the beach landing is one of the most intense and visceral big budget action sequences in years. It would be a horrific place to be, and the carnage and loss of lives certainly reached my expectations for what a conflict like that would look like.

The film in general has a washed out look, akin to Saving Private Ryan, even though the similarities are few and far between. What it brings to the film is a tone of fatalism, there is very little to be joyous about or even much call for hope, especially for our two heroes.

Emily Blunt’s performance as war hero Rita, is probably one of the best performances by anyone in a blockbuster, having to pile on the mental strain that she has already undergone to get where she is, whilst also being an effective warrior, but above all else, a believable character. Something that big budget films often push to the side with female characters, instead choosing to put all the emotional weight behind the male characters. Here though, Blunt holds her own as she fights the urge to allow Cage to get to know her, through each time reset, knowing how difficult it can be to watch the same people die again and again.

The film at times does, through its time travel premise, touch on elements of fate and how predetermined everything is. With each beach landing, everything is precisely as it was the time before, there is no variation, but what Cage and Rita do, learning as they go. But a bigger indicator on this films idea of fate comes later on, near the climax of the film, which mimics events that happen on each beach landing, where the helicopter (a loose term for what it is) is hit by anti-air defences, the same happens later and in a similar way, events play out in a smaller, but near identical way on the ground.  This suggests that, in this world, no matter where this particular battle takes place for Cage and Rita, events and moments will repeat themselves.

Edge of Tomorrow is a prime example of a good film being derailed by a pretty sub-par trailer.

The best big sci-fi film of the year so far and with more wit and brains than you would probably think it had.

Director: Doug Liman

Writers: Christopher McQuarrie (screenplay) and Jez Butterworth (screenplay) & John-Henry Butterworth (screenplay) and Hiroshi Sakurazaka (novel).

Looper

Time travel films are a divisive sub genre of science fiction, for people who refuse to accept that it is impossible (I am not arguing that fact here), they come in sceptical and quick to point out it’s flaws and gaps in the logic. The other group will wait till see what the filmmakers are doing with the time travel device before they make a judgment and their interest and enthusiasm goes one of two ways. Time travel and the basic idea of it, in my opinion is best used when the characters are forced to make difficult moral decisions when faced with a freedom to change something, which luckily Looper has, as an integral part of it’s plot.

The basic plot of the film is that Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a Looper a killer who works for a mob that exists 30 years in a future, so that when they want someone killed, they send him back in time for Joe to kill. But when Old Joe (Bruce Willis) is sent back from the future, Joe hesitates, allowing his older self to escape and cause havoc with his future.

Two of the biggest strengths of the film are the two lead performances, especially from the two main characters, Joe and Old Joe, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis. Gordon-Levitt throughout the film wears, what I assume is some kind of facial prosthetic, so that he looks more like Willis, his jaw and nose are altered the most and it does create a buyable if somewhat jarring, at least initially, visual effect.

As they both play the same character, but at different points in their lives and with different personalities, it is important that they appear as the same character and it’s a tribute to the way that both actors imitate the others facial ticks and mannerisms. In young Joe we get an arrogance that the life he leads now won’t end and that all he wants to do is look after himself. But in old Joe, we get a man who has been changed, by what I won’t say, and is now more in tune with the world, has learned some humility and is willing to sacrifice himself for something he cares deeply enough about.

We see more of young Joe throughout the film, as old Joe only cuts through the film at certain points as he does what he came to do. This was a good decision by writer/director Rian Johnson, as it is young Joe who has the films main arc to carry, which begins with him being one of the best Loopers, to him ending up (a vast amount of the second half takes place here) on a farm with single mum Sara (Emily Blunt) and her son Cid. I won’t go into details about the second half, as it really is best to go and watch it and experience it for yourself.

As with all time travel stories there may be a paradox in their somewhere, which could ruin the story for you if you actively look it out and want to, but in Looper the rules which the world sets itself, for my at least, actively discourage you from looking for a hole, or even thinking that there is hole in the logic. There may be one or two in there, but they won’t affect your viewing of the film.

The look of Looper is one of it’s biggest strengths, the future (young Joe’s world) is not the clean and crisp version of the world that is sometimes portrayed, nor is it the all out dystopia that seems to be the other option. In this future, we haven’t that far on from where we are now, the only difference in the city is that people are still driving cars we drive now and living in the same kind of run down homes that populate most cities. Basically, if you don’t have money you are being left behind. Outside of the city, on Sara’s farm, you would be unable to tell the difference from then to today, bar the odd piece of machinery that is surely only a few years away from us today. This is certainly a world that is believable especially given that it is only 30 years away at this point, it’s not as depressing as Blade Runners Los Angeles, but it is on it’s way.

Looper is beautifully shot, the city’s look crowded and overbearing, whereas the outskirts and farm look warm and comforting, and obvious escape from what the characters know goes on there. The camera is kept secure and the shot expertly composed, we see everything we should and never in jumpy disorientating shakiness that some recent films have used. Cinematographer Steve Yedlin, who has worked with Johnson on all three films, deserves much of the praise for making the films camera work engaging yet never drawing attention to the flashier moments, instead bringing them together with a style that feels fluid once editor Bob Duscay has gotten his hands on it.

Rian Johnson guides us through a story that could have been very confusing with a calm and understandable style, much like Christopher Nolan did with Inception or Duncan Jones (and writer Ben Ripley) with Source Code, giving us a complex idea, but trusting enough that audience will be able to follow the plot and be interested enough to engage and invest in the characters. Johnson certainly has a big future ahead of him if he keeps producing the quality of films that he has so far.

Looper is the kind of sci-fi we don’t get a lot of now, intelligent and full of ideas, so go and see it regardless of how you feel about time travel. Films like this need to be supported, as they don’t come around to often. It is definitely worthy of your time.