I re-watched Edge of Tomorrow last night – probably my fourth or fifth viewing – and it’s just a great film. If you haven’t seen it, would highly recommend. Rotten and IMDB ratings seem to generally agree.
Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt deliver strong leading performances. Cruise is in his element – I’d argue that his tendency to overact (not necessarily a criticism) lends itself to sci-fi even more than “realistic” plots like Mission Impossible. Minority Report is another example. Heightened acting complementing heightened stakes.
Strong supporting performances from Brendan Gleeson and Bill Paxton. Bill’s iconic line “There is no courage without fear”
Standard Hollywood 3 act structure, executed very well. The Act 1 twist (Cruise acquires the power to restart the day), the midpoint low (Cruise’s despair at their inability to cross the battlefield), the Act 3 break (using the transmitter to find the Omega’s real location), the maxed out stakes of the desperate final attack
I need to read the Japanese manga from which the movie is adapted (All You Need Is Kill)
Similar to Inception’s use of “a dream within a dream”, Edge of Tomorrow layers repetitive patterns within the broader repetitive loop which Tom Cruise finds himself trapped in: He wakes up in a helicopter to begin and end the movie, and he wakes up repeatedly throughout to signify resetting the day; He falls in love with Emily’s character by watching her die countless times, just as Emily’s own character fell in love with a man named Hendricks in much the same way when she held the “reset” power
The sci-fi concept of repeating a day (/week/year/life) fascinates me. Groundhog Day was the first such film that I remember watching. There’s also 50 First Dates, Run Lola Run, Primer, among others. I always wonder what I would do with that extra time, and what changes I would make if I truly had a “reset” button.