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Edge of Tomorrow (2014) - Directed by Doug Liman
"What I am about to tell you sounds crazy. But you have to listen to me. Your very lives depend on it. You see, this isn't the first time."
Time travel movies are very hard to do properly, because it's painfully easy to break the rules of time travel. When I was a kid, I noticed Back to the Future doing it fairly often, and it didn't even help About Time because the rules were broken constantly from what I heard. But Edge of Tommorow doesn't have to worry about that, and leaves a lot of room for the characters, story and action!
This action-packed sci-fi romp based on a Japanese novel takes place during a war with an alien race called Mimics, who are winning the war. After Major William Cage threatens his egotistical general to keep him out of the war, the general falsifies records and puts him in the middle of the battlefield. While fighting with the aliens, he's infected by their blood, and finds that he goes back in time to the same moment everytime he dies. When he finds out a famous soldier named Rita Vrataski, A.K.A. the Full Metal Bitch, was once affected by the blood but lost the ability, she teams up with Cage to find out where the aliens make their base and win the war.
I didn't expect much from this when it came out. It's a 2010's Tom Cruise movie, so I expected he was past his prime and his career would end up like Nicolas Cage's career, drifting from bad movie to bad movie relying on his name to make a living while starring in big-budget CGI critic-bombs. But this movie proved me wrong in so many ways.
The story was the best part of the movie. Getting to see how a man changes was what we saw in Groundhog Day, but this time we got to see how a man saves the world and changes the world around him. He had to die hundreds of times to meet his end goal, and how he interacted with the only people he could trust and threatened those who would be quick to send him to a laboratory adds a lot of thrill to the movie, especially considering the movie builds a foundation on this rather than on the amazing battles with the aliens scattered around the movie in the right places.
The tension between Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, or Cage and Rita, does add quite a bit to the movie's more personal feel, and all of the veteran actors make the most of their roles, especially Bill Paxton as master Sergeant Farell, who's cheery attitude during war is so charming it's almost sinister. But unlike a lot of sci-fi greats, there's not a lot of character development besides that.
Other than the character development needing further exploration, I have one more complaint which is more about the movie as a whole, and thus more important. The constant dying might get old after the first hour and a half. It's a good thing director Doug Liman made the decision to mix up the scenes right after Cage's deaths from time to time, but it still might be no surprise.
Edge of Tommorow is one of the best sci-fi action movies of the 2010's. It makes the most of its CGI without relying on it like the Transformers movies, it has a good cast overall, and puts an action-packed twist on the Groundhog Day foundation. It's an essential for Cruise and Blunt, and is one of my favorite movies of 2014.
"What I am about to tell you sounds crazy. But you have to listen to me. Your very lives depend on it. You see, this isn't the first time."
Time travel movies are very hard to do properly, because it's painfully easy to break the rules of time travel. When I was a kid, I noticed Back to the Future doing it fairly often, and it didn't even help About Time because the rules were broken constantly from what I heard. But Edge of Tommorow doesn't have to worry about that, and leaves a lot of room for the characters, story and action!
This action-packed sci-fi romp based on a Japanese novel takes place during a war with an alien race called Mimics, who are winning the war. After Major William Cage threatens his egotistical general to keep him out of the war, the general falsifies records and puts him in the middle of the battlefield. While fighting with the aliens, he's infected by their blood, and finds that he goes back in time to the same moment everytime he dies. When he finds out a famous soldier named Rita Vrataski, A.K.A. the Full Metal Bitch, was once affected by the blood but lost the ability, she teams up with Cage to find out where the aliens make their base and win the war.
I didn't expect much from this when it came out. It's a 2010's Tom Cruise movie, so I expected he was past his prime and his career would end up like Nicolas Cage's career, drifting from bad movie to bad movie relying on his name to make a living while starring in big-budget CGI critic-bombs. But this movie proved me wrong in so many ways.
The story was the best part of the movie. Getting to see how a man changes was what we saw in Groundhog Day, but this time we got to see how a man saves the world and changes the world around him. He had to die hundreds of times to meet his end goal, and how he interacted with the only people he could trust and threatened those who would be quick to send him to a laboratory adds a lot of thrill to the movie, especially considering the movie builds a foundation on this rather than on the amazing battles with the aliens scattered around the movie in the right places.
The tension between Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, or Cage and Rita, does add quite a bit to the movie's more personal feel, and all of the veteran actors make the most of their roles, especially Bill Paxton as master Sergeant Farell, who's cheery attitude during war is so charming it's almost sinister. But unlike a lot of sci-fi greats, there's not a lot of character development besides that.
Other than the character development needing further exploration, I have one more complaint which is more about the movie as a whole, and thus more important. The constant dying might get old after the first hour and a half. It's a good thing director Doug Liman made the decision to mix up the scenes right after Cage's deaths from time to time, but it still might be no surprise.
Edge of Tommorow is one of the best sci-fi action movies of the 2010's. It makes the most of its CGI without relying on it like the Transformers movies, it has a good cast overall, and puts an action-packed twist on the Groundhog Day foundation. It's an essential for Cruise and Blunt, and is one of my favorite movies of 2014.