Edge of Tomorrow Review
Posted by Stephen Lambrechts - 4/6/2014
Here's a premise most gamers would be familiar with: you're a future soldier tasked with overthrowing an alien race that is devastating the Earth. It's going to be a difficult task, so you'll likely need to die and respawn over and over again, learning a little more with every life spent until you're equipped with enough skill and knowledge to take on the final boss and put it down for good. Now imagine this isn't a video game premise, but the actual situation that William Cage (Tom Cruise) finds himself facing in Edge of Tomorrow, the film adaptation of the Japanese sci-fi novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. Unfortunately for him, the fate of the world depends on his success.
A Major in charge of PR and Marketing in the United Defense Force, Cage attempts to blackmail General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) to get out of taking his camera crews to the frontline in the following day's attack. Big mistake - he gets arrested, busted down to private and thrown directly into the war with no combat experience whatsoever. Armed with a power suit, weapons stuck in safety mode and a crew of J-Squad members unwilling to help him, Cage unsurprisingly dies within minutes. He still manages to take one of these aliens down with him, covering himself in its blood in the process.
Cage wakes up again the very next morning, Groundhog Day-style, experiencing everything again in the exact same fashion. The difference is that this time, he has the knowledge of what's going to happen, leading him to start examining ways to change his fate as well as that of the rest of the battalion. His eventual psychic-like skills are witnessed on the battlefield by hero soldier Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) who once experienced the same thing as Cage, but eventually lost it. Vrataski begins to train Cage and the pair begin to get a step closer to ending the war each day. Will they be able to complete their objective before Cage's day-resetting power disappears?
The most surprising thing about Edge of Tomorrow is how humorous and fun it is. Cruise plays the role with a perfect balance of cheekiness and seriousness. Seeing a cowardly Cruise try and talk his way out of his predicament is hilarious. Only Cruise could take a coward and make him somewhat loveable. Cruise goes from trademark smile to a pants-shitting fear in a heartbeat, and once again reminds everyone why he's the world's best movie star. Watching him quickly pick up everything that is going on around him and use it to talk his way past people never really gets old. His back-and-forth with Master Sergeant Farell (Bill Paxton) is particularly grin-inducing. Cage's repeated deaths on the battlefield (and in training) are also played for laughs, but when he does eventually become a badass, it's extremely satisfying.
Emily Blunt gets the most kick-ass role though; she plays a tough as nails heroine that gains celebrity status and the nickname 'Heavy Metal Bitch' after decimating a horde of aliens in a previous battle. She's like a no-nonsense, female Captain America, wielding a melee weapon and wearing power armour like a Warhammer 40K character. Blunt gets the tough job of trying to give her role a character arc, despite it resetting on a daily basis. Thankfully, she pulls it off with flying colours. After Looper (and to a lesser extent, The Adjustment Bureau), the science fiction streak Blunt is currently on seems to be in full swing, and with a major heroic role like this in the bag, it's exciting to think of the kinds of action and sci-fi heroines she might play in the future. She definitely has the goods to become a genre mainstay.
Director Doug Liman once again brings the fresh shooting style he picked up on early indie films like Swingers and Go and applies it successfully to a big studio action film. He probably doesn't get as much credit as he deserves for this (he basically reinvented the look of modern action cinema with The Bourne Identity), but his pacing and editing really do drive the film forward without slowing down; no easy task when the scripts calls for the same scenes to be repeated over and over again.
The film's action is visceral and intense, with (the first version of) the big battle being a standout. Presented in 3D, scenes of drop troopers looking down from their ships at the battlefield have a nice sense of depth, one shot in particular of flaming debris raining down from above towards the screen works very well. The battle scenes, while largely bloodless, still evoke a sense of dread and danger as we see the members of J-Squad get annihilated as Cage looks on in horror. It's not Saving Private Ryan-style carnage, but for a PG-13 film the effect is quite impactful.
One of the film's weaknesses is that its villains are not very clearly defined. Rarely do we get a good look at them. Imagine a giant pile of black worms made of tar shifting around rapidly and you have a good idea of what they look like. The film's final mission isn't hugely creative either, feeling like a bit like a beat-for-beat re-enactment of Pacific Rim's ending. These are minor problems though, as everything else about Edge of Tomorrow is operating at top level. Cruise puts in a movie star performance that is up there with the best he's ever given (in fact, everyone from Bill Paxton, Emily Blunt and even small supporting players like Aussies Noah Taylor and Kick Gurry bring their A-game), and when you add to that a smart script with an intriguing plot, energetically-staged action and an abundance of laughs, you get one of the most enjoyable blockbusters of the year.
★★★★
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