Review: Edge of Tomorrow – starship troopers meets groundhog day while running after lola

Edge of Tomorrow is a sci-fi film starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, directed by Doug Liman and written by Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth.
It’s about the United Defense Force waging war on an alien invasion in Europe, Major Cage (Cruise) gets plunged into combat, without adequate training he stumbles upon a time loop. Throw in some very hand held camera work, nice visuals and Tom Cruise, and… go!

The good; there’s nothing new here as far as story, but boy do I like it. The aliens are called Mimics, and they’ve got humanity beat, but our newest latest, best weapon is this Battle Suit. It gives the common soldier more fire power, strength and speed capable of combating these mimics. Whenever we have a superior alien force battling humanity, in films anyway, common bullets always seems to be the answer (Starship Troopers, Battle Los Angeles, Battleship…), this time we get a little more firepower, which makes it more believable, although the battle suit isn’t all encompassing/enclosed for protection…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, love or hate Tom Cruise, but the man is a movie star, he carries this film. When we first see him in his pseudo-Marine uniform I first thought… “that hair cut isn’t regulation sir… but this is a world they’ve created, plus we’re in war time so maybe hair cuts aren’t the biggest priority.” But then he’s not a combat soldier, so that makes sense.

If you’ve seen the trailers, then you know that Cage (Cruise) dies over and over again, the film does a great job in explaining how this happens, it’s actually very satisfying, and builds up to how Cage can do what he does.

The bad; the action sequence… why all the hand-held crappy, I mean, camera work?? Did Liman go to the Michael Bay school of crapulence? There’s some great stuff going on, it’s the D-Day invasion of Normandy, but with exo-suits, frikkin’ exo-suits! It looks awesome… yet, I can’t see things.

The trailers give a lot away.

Overall, check it out, go see it on the big screen and enjoy the visuals with a very satisfying story.

Reading up on the production of this film, there were problems with the third act, I like to credit McQuarrie for making the script great. All through the film I had this anime feel/notion, then I come to learn that it’s based on the Japanese light novel (young adult) entitled All You Need Is Kill.

 

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