Edge of Tomorrow
Directed by:
Doug LimanCinematography:
Dion BeebeCast:
Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson, Noah Taylor, Kick Gurry, Dragomir Mrsic, Charlotte Riley, Jonas Armstrong, Franz Drameh, Tony Way (more)VOD (4)
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New Special Forces recruit William 'Bill' Cage (Tom Cruise) is equipped with a powered exoskeleton and sent on a mission to fight a fierce alien race known as Mimics, who are ultimately unstoppable. Cage soon dies in combat but, caught in a time loop, he finds himself very much alive and once again facing the same battle. This process repeats itself several times but with every fight Cage grows stronger and more adept. He meets tough warrior Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) and together they try to bring down the enemy once and for all. (Warner Bros. UK)
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Already a classic that you will gladly reach for when you’re feeling down. A great screenplay which borrows just enough, combines what we like from Aliens, Starship Trooper (more faithful to Heinlein’s book than the movie) or Groundhog Day. Amazing production design (reminds me of the Crysis videogame), it’s dirty as the sand on the beaches in Normandy (70th anniversary, hip-hip). Tom manages to get round both the yellow-bellied coward and the killer machine and Emily Blunt plays a tom-boy women’s hero in Ripley style, Paxton was pleasing. Clever, funny and mainly an entertaining blockbuster which suited me the most this season so far. Get up, you worm!
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So what did I like? That there was a sense of Japanese sparseness in the narration and portrayal of the characters. The action/drama was subtly diluted with humor, or a little romance, but nothing that made you roll your eyes. I didn't see a single American flag, didn't hear the American national anthem, and there wasn't even anyone giving stupid patriotic obnoxiously cliched speeches about how important it was to man up and go out and fight and that we're going to show these aliens what for and blah blah blah. It just wasn't there, and I cheered. Plus the characters were portrayed as people, with their own problems, their own histories, so they weren't just flat characters with a gun in their hands and some catchphrase. But what I liked best was the interplay between Cruise and Blunt, just a joy to watch. Granted, it did lose momentum towards the end and it felt like the film was squeezing out the last drops (but maybe I was squeezing out the last drops because the theater was sweltering), but it ended well and I left very satisfied in the end. This is exactly the blockbuster I wanted – an unpretentious film, and yet it has an engaging story, a quality cast, a decent OST, and action that wasn't shot with a shaky camera, so the viewer could see something and enjoy it too. Nice, and I have no choice but to say – keep it up.
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I’m fascinated that the American viewer (the sponsor of the American filmmaking industry) prefers a commercial mishmash called Transformers to an imaginative sci-fi called Edge of Tomorrow, where the name essentially does not reveal anything and the movie can only surprise. The Japanese are known for always having great storylines in their stories and comic books, and I’m glad that finally one of those got this kind of interpretation with Tom Cruise in the leading role. For me, he will probably always be the actor who has signed up for sci-fi movies. Considering he’s a Scientologist, I’m not even surprised that he makes such films. I’m actually very happy that he’s the one to do it, because it fits him the most. As a result, after watching the film, I thought hard about whether to give it five stars. I had a slight issue with the camera, which blurred my vision in a similar way a decent 5 km run can. But that is Doug Liman for you. However, if not for his directing, I might not have seen such an amazing change in Tom’s role. So I can only add that this film has its pros and cons, but even so, it is probably my favorite one from this year’s movies.
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Very well executed concept known from Groundhog Day, Source Code and probably every sci-fi series ever made. At the beginning, the hero is introduced without any heroic attributes and the pandemonium of war that follows during the landing in Normandy sets the bar very high. And it holds there damn long. Edge of Tomorrow only stumbles a little by the end, where the thus far relatively reaistic battles (to the extent than a battle between people in exoskeletons and giant tentacled aliens can be described as “realistic”) abandon the realism and now they are falling from huge heights without any injuries and the entire final fight goes too smoothly, especially considering how important it is and how it goes straight down to business. That said, it’s an excellent action sci-fi blockbuster of the kind that has been missing in cinemas for a long time. The action is spectacular, Cruise and Blunt have good chemistry and the script also has a couple of nice moments.
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Some of the information in this review goes beyond what you might want to know before seeing the film. Edge of Tomorrow is clearly the most expensive example of silly gameplay to come along in a long time and possibly the most popular film among Cruise’s detractors, because in no other film does Tom die so many times. With its bold combining of the poetics of both films and video games, it underestimates the difference in the elementary principles on which the cinematic and gaming experiences are based. We go back to games because of the possibility to become (through our avatars) stronger, faster and more agile and to improve these abilities through repeated playing. Films take the element of interactivity out of our identification with the character and deprive us of the feeling that we are the ones who are becoming more capable (though in a certain respect, every viewing of a film is also an interactive activity during which we improve our cognitive ability). Therefore, films should strive to flesh out the characters and to support our emotional connection to them by gradually doling out information. In short, a well-thought-out story and believable characters should have priority over the more immediate “motion and emotion”. In this respect, Edge of Tomorrow falls critically short. The story is just as one-dimensional and dully straightforward as in any given action video game. The characters don’t put much effort into finding a solution that doesn’t involve a lot of shooting and corpses. Though we get into the protagonist’s head on a number of occasions and see the world through his eyes (the very game-like scanning of the space), the film does not give us enough clues as to why we should root for him. Besides the fact that he is a coward who doesn’t want to fight, we learn almost nothing else about him. His vague characterisation corresponds to the requirement of “open” video-game characters onto which players can easily project themselves. (Emily “Full Metal“ Blunt thus portrays the formulaic beautiful action heroine whom every second nerd can platonically fall in love with – though she is outwardly stubborn, tough and indomitable, the increasingly capable hero takes her under his wing as expected and she is thus transformed into just another fragile love interest). However, what works in a video game comes across as screenwriting laziness in a film. The most pronounced transformation that the protagonist undergoes consists in the improvement of his physical skills rather than in the reassessment of his opinions on war, fatalism and other issues that lend themselves to the story. But particularly because of the special abilities that he possesses, we don’t have any reason to fear for him through most of the film (the screenplay certainly does not sufficiently exploit the potential of the situation when Cage was only seriously wounded but didn’t die). We can thus only be amused by the various ways he dies and how he embarrasses the other characters with the scope of his knowledge. Not even the narratively important fact that in some scenes he sees farther into the future than the viewer does (and is thus explicitly used as the narrator of the story, or rather as a player who makes it through to the next level) was elaborated beyond simple gags and affected gestures. Liman was ironically least influenced by video games in directing the action scenes, which contain three times more cuts than would be necessary, so they are at least three times less clear than they could have been. Edge of Tomorrow is an entertaining summer lark that graphically demonstrates how counterproductive an excessive yet poorly though-out attempt to combine film and video-game elements can be. Simple imitation is not enough and, at least in my case, leads especially to thoughts about how much more fun it would have been to just play the game. 70%
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