Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman and starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, got virtually unanimous praise when it came out, and I immediately put it on my list of movies to watch. That was in 2014 — eleven years ago — which might give an idea how my movie backlog is going.
As it turns out, the virtually unanimous praise was absolutely correct. It’s a great sci-fi action movie, made all the more remarkable when you think of how badly it could’ve gone without the right people making it.
Edge of Tomorrow has all the ingredients of a shamelessly corny, inexcusably derivative, hour and a half of people winking at the camera and dispensing the cheesiest dialogue before heading dutifully into the next completely predictable action movie cliche. But it knows exactly what to do with those ingredients, cleverly combining and remixing everything to keep it feeling fresh, and letting all of the cliched action movie scenes work exactly like they were intended to before they became cliches.
It’s also excellent to see Cruise playing so hard against type for so long at the beginning of the movie. Or rather, playing what he realizes is his public persona, instead of the role he almost always plays in action blockbusters. His character is so smarmy, and he leans into it. You can immediately tell that this guy has gotten where he is by being good-looking and charming, and the script really drives home that he’s all about appearances with no substance. And then it conveniently has him do something awful, so you feel justified in hating him. And you can really savor seeing the shit getting kicked out of him for the next fifteen or twenty minutes.
Of course, any sense of that is more or less undone by the rest of the movie, which has him saving the entire world, but a) of course it does, and b) it gives him a real redemption arc, as opposed to being a super-hero whose obstacles are all external.
They knew that the comparisons to Aliens were going to be obvious, so it was clever to cast Bill Paxton as the master sergeant over a private who’s arrogant and scared shitless. In fact, the familiarity of the whole squad doesn’t seem like a lack of imagination so much as setting us up with the same feeling as our protagonist, that we’ve seen this all before, many times.
I liked that it neither tried to hide all of its various influences, or try to make excuses for them by calling them out. Yeah, it’s like Groundhog Day and Starship Troopers. We know. That’s the premise. It’s so obvious that we don’t even need to mention it.
It feels like there’s a whole sub-genre of time-loop movies at this point, and it’s a sign of how smart the filmmakers are, and how much they seem to trust the basic intelligence of the audience, that the edits are made at all the right places. You see just enough of the repeated material to be able to follow what’s going on, but rarely so much that it’s tedious. The main exception is during the training sequences, but that’s also deliberately repetitious to drive home that he’s spent a lot of time in training. Later in the movie, they do a lot of clever things with dramatic irony, where we only learn along with the other characters that the protagonist has been through this scene already.
My favorite of the time jumps, by the way, is when Cage/Cruise skillfully escapes from the squad by rolling underneath a passing truck… and then is immediately run over. A lot of the first act of the movie seems to be having a lot of fun with the idea of “Ethan Hunt would never!”
Edge of Tomorrow does a great job of establishing its rules, playing within them, and then violating them to introduce the next obstacle. My main criticism is that I wish they’d done a little bit more, even though I can’t imagine exactly what. It was a little disappointing that the movie had been so cleverly remixing and rejuvenating action movie cliches, and then just ended by blowing up the Super Boss Alien. I’d been hoping for one more twist on the whole thing, or one bit of clever manipulation of the rules — instead of just repeating things over and over until they got them right — like Rita/Blunt deliberately getting re-dosed with alpha blood, or learning that there never was an “omega,” or something.
Then again, watching Ballerina and John Wick recently has taught me that sometimes less is more. Adding more “depth” or complications to an action movie can just slow it down, or undermine everything that makes it work. Edge of Tomorrow feels like a movie that uses familiar action movie cliches not because it couldn’t think of any better ideas, but because there’s a good reason those moments are so familiar. They’re satisfying.
