It’s a small pity many more viewers will catch this admittedly entertaining film than 2011’s far better Source Code. While both are sci-fi endeavors with a Groundhog Day-like time-loop as their touchstone, Edge Of Tomorrow edges into a muddled zone of plausibility despite its highly engaging first half. Luckily, Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt play the leads and it surely doesn’t hurt having Bill Pullman around in a key supporting role. Basically on sold ground as a futuristic actioner, Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne identity, and the under-appreciated Go), grapples with eventually trying to do too much. It does nice things with the notion that saving the world from Mimics, alien creatures far smarter than we are, boils down to the will of a reluctant hero.
Cruise, rarely better, convincingly plays Major William Cage, a fish out of water who is suddenly thrust into combat from his prior duty as a PR liaison despite his status as an honorary officer who had previously been protected from the front lines. When it sure looks like he’s killed after parachuting into a nasty swarm of the hyper-spider/octopus-like aliens, he abruptly wakes up and realizes he’s back at a point in time before boarding the combat plane. He’ll go on to relive the same mission, always coming back to the same morning. He soon re-encounters his antagonistic sergeant (Pullman), who had pegged Cruise as a deserter in a stolen officer’s uniform. In a hop, skip, and a jump Cruise is hobnobbing with a legendary helmetless warrior, Rita Vrataski, “The Angel of Verdum,” (Blunt), who must be famous since her mug is plastered on the side of a bus. She’ll come to train him; from all the implied repetition he’ll come to get to know her more than is wise for the sake of their mission.
An unusual alien warfare strategy backfires and Cruise suddenly possesses an errant power that can be kept alive by his making sure he dies each time he goes through the cycle again. With the fearless Blunt and a know-it-all wacky scientist leading the way, he tries each time to go a little further to capturing the Omega, the “brain” of the alien forces. Take away the charismatic Cruise and the non-action segments of this film would probably be dull. His humor in dealing with the repetition’s many challenges keeps Edge Of Tomorrow from sinking into just-another-big-budget-cool-special-effects-flick territory.
Based on a 2004 novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, it’s original title was All You Need Is Kill. Better it should have been changed to All You Need Is Inconsistency. The plot’s increasing complications, trying their damnest to pull you out of the story, verge on going twist-and-turn-happy. The nice thing about Source Code is it scaled down the fuzziness, then saved the headscratcher for its wallop of an ending, rather than the other way around. In Edge Of Tomorrow, the layers of density build up, only to lead to a near-silly Hollywood ending that’s totally inconsistent with the plot’s own logic. It sure is fun watching Cruise and Blunt though.