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).
