Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Doug Liman emerged as a director in the late 1990s with smart indie works like Swingers (1996) and Go (1999). It was in the next few years that Liman proved himself with slick commercial hits such as The Bourne Identity (2002) and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), only falling down somewhat with his first genre outing, the teleportation film Jumper (2008). Subsequent to Edge of Tomorrow, Liman returned to genre material with the Young Adult Chaos Walking (2021), plus also produced the George R.R. Martin tv series Nightflyers (2018). Edge of Tomorrow is based on All You Need is Kill (2004), a Japanese short novel that was written for Young Adult audiences.

The basic set-up reminds of a good deal of Groundhog Day (1993), which had Bill Murray trapped in a timeloop forced to live the same day over and over. While both films approach the idea from almost opposing perspectives – Groundhog Day as a romantic comedy, Edge of Tomorrow as an alien invasion/war film – they share the theme of the man forced to endlessly repeat the same scenario until he finds a winning strategy that involves bringing together everything he has learned. Groundhog Day‘s timeloop scenario has played in a surprising number of other films such as 12:01 (1993), Retroactive (1997), Run Lola Run (1998), Naken (2000), The Last Day of Summer (2007), Repeaters (2010), ARQ (2016), Before I Fall (2017), Happy Death Day (2017), Naked (2017), Boss Level (2020), Palm Springs (2020), The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2021) and Re/Member (2022), even two entire tv series with Day Break (2006-7) and Russian Doll (2019- ).

In particular, there are a number of similarities to Duncan Jones’ Source Code (2011), which had Jake Gyllenhaal projected into another man’s mind and repeatedly replaying the last few minutes leading up to a bomb going off aboard a train in different combinations in an effort to understand what happened. For greater detail about Timeloop Films see Timeloop Films.

That it ventures into a theme that has been dealt with several times before does not detract from the fact that Edge of Tomorrow is a sharp, intelligent and well made film (even more of a rarity for something pitched to the midst of the Hollywood summer season). There is the slim dividing line where Edge of Tomorrow could easily have tipped over to become a mindless Michael Bay-type vehicle that was all empty spectacle focused around explosions, shooting and mass destruction – and certainly the climactic assault on the ruins of The Louvre with a downed plane does approach something of this. It is more the case though that the big spectacular action movie is an element happening in the background and clearly suborned to the story that takes place in the foreground.

The film has a strong character driven story. While most action films feature a lead who enters the show tough, dangerous and/or cocky and in command and fully assured of his abilities, by contrast here, Tom Cruise’s character starts out a slick hotshot whose first actions are to weasel out of combat duty and try to blackmail his superior officer before being listed as a deserter, thrust into combat untrained and without even a clue how to get the safety off his weaponry. The strong arc he undergoes throughout the rest of the film comes as we see him being trained, passing through multiple failures to gain assurance with his equipment and his eventual growth into the person who can singlehandedly lead the rest of the troupe on a mission to win the war.

Doug Liman drives the film with grit and intelligence. This could be Battle Los Angeles (2011) with a brain instead of patriotic flag-waving. I particularly liked the casual nonchalance with which Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt keep treating his daily death or the gag you invariably get in these timeloop films of Cruise becoming so familiar with people’s responses that he can tell them their entire life stories or avoid punches swung at him with his eyes closed.

What I also liked was the way that the plot manages to come with a number of twists that are constantly surprising. Unlike Groundhog Day and its abovementioned imitators, which are essentially about perfecting the same scenario until they get it right, the plot here is constantly changing – when one avenue of approach proves impassable, it heads off on another thread to the point that the film has the characters ranging between three different countries at various points.

Tom Cruise is one of the those love him or hate him actors but what you cannot deny is that he is a consummate professional in everything he does and is constantly pushing to make the films he is in the best he can. Emily Blunt is a rising actress I have admired. In my mind, she is always associated with British costume dramas or romantic/Chick Flick works. She doesn’t seem the sort of actress who readily suggests tough action heroine and so the surprise here is seeing her cast as someone lithe, unsentimental and in charge and moreover one who is often ordering Tom Cruise about and running rings around him.

The scene-stealer of the show however manages to be Bill Paxton, an actor whose great presence has been missed on cinema screens for much of the 2000s, which he has mostly spent in the often thought-provoking tv series Big Love (2006-11). Here Paxton puts his all into the role of the bawling drill sergeant and manages to own most of the screen to frequently hilarious effect whenever he is around.