It's rare that the art of movies and the business of their distribution coincide as closely as they do with 'Edge of Tomorrow,' the director Doug Liman's new science-fiction vehicle for Tom Cruise. It opens this Friday, June 6th, the seventieth anniversary of D Day-and that massive and decisive Normandy landing, tweaked to fit the movie's futuristic premise, is also its main dramatic event. The metaphorical overlay of fantasy and history is the best thing 'Edge of Tomorrow' has to offer-and, for much of its running time, that overlay is enough to lend the movie a shiver of curious power.
'Edge of Tomorrow,' as everyone already knows, is a sci-fi war film with a 'Groundhog Day'-like premise: Cruise plays a soldier who, after being killed in combat, awakens the day before the battle and must relive, over and over, the moment of his death. Yet the movie hidden behind 'Edge of Tomorrow' isn't 'Groundhog Day' but, rather, 'Saving Private Ryan.' The terrifyingly gory opening sequence of Steven Spielberg's film-the landing at Omaha Beach-poses a fundamental question about war: If the D Day combat had been reported in real time and in detail, if the uncensored newsreel footage that it generated played like Spielberg's realistic scene-with its dismembered limbs, dangling viscera, incinerated bodies, cries of agony, scattered corpses, and waves of blood-would the American public have tolerated the pursuit of the war until the enemies' surrender? And would sufficient numbers of American men have fought in it willingly?
That question is the premise of 'Edge of Tomorrow': the world is battling alien creatures who have killed hundreds of millions of people in Europe, and the allied army, known as the United Defense Force (U.D.F.), is planning a colossal and top-secret mobilization to cross the English Channel and gain a beachhead in France in order to reconquer the continent from the invading organisms. On the eve of the great mission, Major William Cage (Cruise), a U.D.F. information officer, is ordered to be embedded in a combat battalion in order to 'sell the war' to the citizenry.
Because the setup is the source of much of the movie's pleasure, more or less any discussion of the story is a spoiler. 'Edge of Tomorrow' is a movie that offers primarily the glee of its telling-the well-crafted delight of a tall fantasy that's as shallow as it is clever-and I'm going to indulge in the pleasure of this well-wrought yarn by simply telling it.
Cage, a former advertising executive who has no military training or background, wants no part of the fight, and he refuses the order from the general in command (Brendan Gleeson). He tries to flee, and is tased into submission-only to awaken in the staging area, demoted to private, and forced into a front-line combat unit under the hard-nosed command of Master Sergeant Farell (Bill Paxton). But the beach landing goes horribly awry. The troops are being massacred by the superfast, thrashing, whip-tentacled monsters, and Cage, confronting an especially big and mean creature, is himself quickly killed. Then, in a brashly effective and simple cut from one shot to another, Cage comes instantly back to life, restored to the way he was at the start of the day of battle, at the moment of his reawakening after being tased.
The crucial and delicious detail is that Cage's curse, to die again endlessly (though, somehow, seemingly painlessly), affords him a limitless capacity to learn on the job-each return to battle is both another lesson in warfare and another chance to probe the enemy's vulnerabilities. Soon, reawakening at the British base, Cage chooses a martial mentor: Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), a commando fighter who was the heroine of the U.D.F.'s one prior military victory on the continent (she's nicknamed the Angel of Verdun, extending a metaphor one generation back). Vrataski trains Cage and accompanies him into battle. They are both helped by a discredited physicist (Noah Taylor), whose speculative simulations reveal the enemy's deft deceptions and hidden weakness.
The idea of the movie (based on the novel ' All You Need Is Kill,' by Hiroshi Sakurazaka) is a corker, which is why it's worth reëmphasizing the spoiler alert. At the same time as Cage's reiterated lives allow him to master the monsters, we learn that the monsters' central brain has allowed Cage to be regenerated on purpose. The monster brain is using Cage to learn how humans fight. Vrataski was also similarly chosen. As it turns out, she offered humanity a Pyrrhic victory at Verdun: the aliens allowed her troops to win there in order to observe and master her tactics. When Cage and Vrataski figure this out, they recognize that they have to get one step ahead of the aliens on the learning curve, and must anticipate their play one move in advance, in order to make their decisive advance toward Paris. (The story deals with the sci-fi problem of parallel worlds by making each new iteration ontologically supersede the previous one: last world, definitive world.)
'Edge of Tomorrow' conveys its ingenious, historically resonant premise but never develops it. The narrative is high-concept gimmickry realized with efficiency and energy but not much imagination. The engineering of the intricate story, and the deft dovetailing needed to iterate multiple lives in rapid succession, seem to have taxed Liman's art, as does the effort to simulate chemistry between Cruise and Blunt. She's an active and alert performer who, throughout, seems to want more-a character with a life story to sink her interpretive teeth into-whereas Cruise takes Cage's one-note backstory, the cowardly out-of-work ad man, and expands it, and himself, to the breaking point. Cruise's eternal sheen of callow youth is integrated into the very substance of the film. As Cage is converted by circumstances into a hardened and capable fighting machine (veering toward superhero territory), the story tracks his dramatic transformation, in under two hours, from a raw trainee into a military hero. 'Edge of Tomorrow' turns out to be the movie that Cage was ordered to make: his greatest recruiting film.
What difference would it make to such a juicy tale if Liman had brought more imagination to its direction? If he had parsed the action with more detail and more nuance or had conceived and encapsulated the characters with more insight? The problem with a good story that's nothing more than a good story is that it exhausts itself in the telling, as this one does, and never makes the leap from idea to experience. 'Edge of Tomorrow' requires Cage's heroism to be simultaneously physical and intellectual, a matter of calculation and anticipation as well as of courage and execution. What's missing from the movie is the existential adventure that it implies-the confrontation with death, the overcoming of pain. Liman offers war leached of horror-death without pain, memory without trauma-and narrows Cage to a stick figure emptied of the fascinating and disturbing psychological implications of his adventure. The movie is also humorless-at least, devoid of intentional humor. Yet the demands of the international movie-distribution marketplace seem to be responsible for a howlingly funny clinching line of dialogue, capping the heroes' success: 'Russian and Chinese forces are marching across Europe without resistance.' It promises an utterly unintended sequel.
Post By http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2014/06/a-spoiler-filled-review-of-edge-of-tomorrow-tom-cruise.html
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