Tom Cruise lives to die in sci-fi wargasm ‘Edge of Tomorrow’
TOM CRUISE, FLAMING | The ageing action star fights time-traveling extraterrestrials in a film that owes as much to the structure of a first-person shooter video game as to ‘Groundhog Day’ and ‘Aliens.’
ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Life+Style Editor
This week marks the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, so I’m not quite sure the release of Edge of Tomorrow, a sci-fi wargasm starring Tom Cruise, is genius, fortuitous or just downright tacky. Possibly a combination. The events in the film mirror WWII is some obvious ways, from the locale (France has fallen and the allied forces are about to sortie from England for a massive invasion on the Normandy beachhead) to the naming of the operation — Downfall, it’s own kind of D-Day. Of course, Eisenhower was just fighting Nazis, not multi-tentacled extraterrestrials who reproduce like a computer worm. And only Cruise can stop them.
Ummm, wait… Tom Cruise? Isn’t he, like, 50? When did Uncle Sam raise the age of his cannon-fodder?
The fact that Cruise, as Maj. Bill Cage, is about two decades past his prime as an infantryman, is actually handled by the script, though awkwardly: His character — a TV-friendly press agent for the Army better at selling the war than fighting it — is assigned to be a grunt for unfathomable reasons by a prick general (Brendan Gleeson, who appears to have eaten John Candy) for no reason other than to explain his inexperience and cowardice on the field of battle. He’ll surely die.
Only he won’t. Edge of Tomorrow is the Groundhog Day of war pictures, where one character relives his experiences over and over again, each time being the only person to remember what happened before the last time he was killed. Which, necessarily, means he keeps getting better and better. (“Any enemy who knows the future can’t fail,” as one character summarizes it.)
If that premise — fighting, dying, fighting again, improving until you win — sounds familiar, it’s not just from a Bill Murray comedy; it’s the very premise of every first-person shooter video game of the last three decades. You spend a lot of time in the upper levels, not quite knowing what your goal even is, and you just get to keep on playing until you master it. (It’s no coincidence that Cage’s hard-nosed drill sergeant is played by Bill Paxton, whose memorable line from another grunts in space actioner, Aliens, was “Game over, man — game over.” Only this game is never over.)
All of which makes Edge of Tomorrow one of the most appalling pieces of Hollywood sleight-of-hand every created. It’s bad enough that movie studios inundate us (especially during the scorching summer months) with an endless parade of sequels, remakes, pop-culture adaptations and reboots, from X-Men to Godzilla to Jump Street (some of which might even be entertaining, though that’s hardly the point); now they must produce quite literally the most generic of actioners, a film not just inspired by a video game but which actually mimics its fundamental qualities. (The screenplay even seems to be toying with us on this point — the alien invaders are called “mimics,” but for no apparent reason other than an inside joke.)
None of this makes Edge of Tomorrow bad, exactly; craven, yes, and exploitive, and hardly an instant classic. But this is Tom Cruise we’re talking about, in many ways the one great movie star of the past 30 years (he’s been making hits consistently since 1983’s Risky Business). He plays the goofy hero with less smugness than Bruce Willis, less pomposity that Stallone, and even his flops (Knight & Day, Jack Reacher) aren’t especially attributable to him. He’s the approachable leading man, the one we can easily project ourselves onto. He diffuses scenes with a sense of humor that most actors not known for comedic roles could not.
Still, even he can’t justify the puzzling premise, and director Doug Liman’s itchy camera is dizzying in all the wrong ways — it seems like he’s trying to outdo Michael Bay for sure noisy spectacle. And the whole time-travel gimmick? Please, it was lame in X-Men: Days of Future Past, where it just happened once (I stopped counting at 13 here, and the film suggests hundreds of time-leaps that aren’t shown.)
Emily Blunt and Noah Taylor have some good moments as the only two people who (initially) believe in Cage’s wild story, but this isn’t a film that gives too much consideration for fine-layered performances. With nods to the Alien franchise, A Few Good Men and several others, Edge — like Maj. Cage himself — doesn’t care too much about being its own man. It’s sufficient that you walk away from it with a vague sense of affection. True love is for chick-flicks.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition June 6, 2014.