I didn’t have high hopes for this. I don’t think much of Tom Cruise. Leading men rarely turn in the great performances that character actors do, and his style of action doesn’t appeal to me. Still, this movie has an 8.1 on IMDB. So… I finally watched it.
It’s a really messy movie. It takes a long time to get going. His first death doesn’t happen until about 25 minutes into the movie. Once he starts re-living the same day, it gets a bit more fun. There’s some levity, and some of the deaths that happen are actually very pleasing, in a philosophical way. There are enough deaths that seem completely avoidable, and it’s nice to see that not everything is an action sequence.
Then, there’s a scene, about 45 minutes in, that just turned the whole thing into one long groan. The movie attempts to give an explanation for the time rewind. Not just that, but it attempts to turn it into a major plot device. This shift is terrible. I have a hard time articulating it, especially without giving huge spoilers, but effectively… the aliens have the ability to control time. Or at least one variation of the aliens does. The alien rewinds time in order to conquer planets (I think). What triggers the alien rewinding time is when another variation of alien is killed. Somehow, by being doused with the blood of one of those aliens when he’s first killed, our hero automatically rewinds time every time he dies. He retains his knowledge and skills, but no one else does.
I was talking with Cathy about this. Part of what made Groundhog Day work was that the movie feels less like it takes place in the real world. You aren’t certain if the protagonist is just living through a simulacrum of the real world - more of a religious experience. In this movie, the protagonist has someone else to guide him through the experience. This sets it in the real world.
One of the rules I’ve read about screenwriting is about the limits on how many magical elements you can have in a movie. You want to have a movie with vampires? That’s fine. If you introduce aliens in that vampire movie… you’re out of luck. It gets too ridiculous too quickly. That’s what I felt like this movie did. It established aliens and some kind of time rewind. Then it joined them together in a way that felt like a new piece of magic.
The ending feels wrong. Even if you buy into the rules that the movie lays out at the midpoint, it just doesn’t make sense to me. The enemy brain is destroyed, and somehow, time resets, and the brain is no more? Who triggered the time reset? The protagonist, or the brain? I lean toward the brain, since then it would carry the bombs back into the past (wait, even that doesn’t make sense). Let me map this out.
Choice 1
The brain triggers the time reset.
This means that it carries the bombs back in time with itself, then explodes. This doesn’t work.
This would also mean that protagonist doesn’t get coated in blood, which means that he would die permanently.
Choice 2
Protagonist triggers the time reset
This doesn’t make sense, since he would have died in the explosion caused by the bomb well before he would get coated in blood.
Choice 3
Protagonist never lost his ability to reset time
This would work. Except… there’s the line about how there was this surge of energy from the death of the enemy brain, which happens well in the past. This simply doesn’t make sense.
Most of these things would never bother me, except that the movie takes itself too seriously.
The main character has a trivial arc. It’s not something that he chooses, either. He should have an arc where he chooses to be a hero, where he decides to be something greater than he was. Instead, this comes across as a selfish journey, where he only decides to be heroic because it might get him out of this situation.
I’m clearly in the minority on this movie. I looked through pages of IMDB comments, and the lowest rating I found was a 7/10.
To make this movie a little more messy... the title is terrible. Edge of Tomorrow doesn't tell me anything about what I'm going to be watching. So they've tried to change the title to the tagline - Live. Die. Repeat. I don't think much of that title either. The manga it's based on is titled All You Need is Kill. That's not a great title, but at least it's memorable.
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