Looping Around the EDGE OF TOMORROW!
Hello! This article is a part of the Adventure-a-Thon, hosted by Cinematic Catharsis & Realweegiemidget Reviews. Enjoy!
Why are time loop movies so compelling? What makes filmmakers and creatives continually return to the gimmick of a character stuck in the same repeating day over and over again?
When you pull up the Wikipedia page for “list of movies featuring time loops”, you’re faced with no less than 79 entries, with features from all across the globe, many of which predate the most popular time loop movie of all time. That would of course be GROUNDHOG DAY, the 1993 Harold Ramis-directed Bill Murray vehicle that so permanently ingrained the very idea of a “time loop movie” into our culture, to the point that you can explain the premise of similar films just by evoking its name. “SOURCE CODE is GROUNDHOG DAY with Jake Gyllenhaal!” “Andy Samberg is doing a GROUNDHOG DAY with PALM SPRINGS!” “Doctor Strange pulled a GROUNDHOG DAY to defeat Dormammu!” That sort of thing.
But why are they so compelling? Well, what’s so fun about GROUNDHOG DAY, and its basic gimmick of a man stuck reliving the whole day over and over until he “gets it right”, is not all the clever ways it explores the potential ways one could theoretically spend an eternal day of immortality (let’s start jumping off buildings! Or eating like a slob! Or smoking!). No, what’s fun and engaging about it is watching someone fail and fail and fail again in pursuit of a genuine goal (in this instance, getting the girl by going from a grouch into a good-doer), all so that you can revel in the moments of growth that result from that failure.
Because that’s life, baby.
In effect, time loop movies are a creative expression of the actual process of learning. However, the big advantage the movies have is that, instead of enduring the life-long grind that learning tends to be in reality, we can experience and relate to the whole thing in two hours or so. And we can watch movie stars go through it instead of our dumb selves. Believe me, it’s much more fun that way! There are a plethora of “time loop” movies (and that’s not even getting into the innumerable television episodes that utilize the concept), but the best ones know that, no matter what the underlying genre may be, we enjoy watching characters learn and grow as a result of being stuck in a day.
Enter EDGE OF TOMORROW!
Or….enter LIVE. DIE. REPEAT!
Or…enter what YouTube had clumsily landed on.
Enter LIVE. DIE. REPEAT: EDGE OF TOMORROW!
EDGE OF TOMORROW
Directed by: Doug Liman
Starring: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton Brendan Gleeson
Written by: Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth
Length: 113 minutes
Released: June 6, 2014
EDGE OF TOMORROW could reasonably be referred to as “Action movie GROUNDHOG DAY!”, because, yeah, that’s about the long and short of it. For a little under two hours, we watch Major William Gate (Tom Cruise), a glorified PR rep, get forced into combat, where he is accidentally gooped by a mystical alien blood that suddenly traps him in the same day over and over, allowing him the opportunity to figure out how to save a world already fighting back alien armies from a decisive sneak attack. In order to do so, he has to continuously convince super soldier (and public face of the human resistance) Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) that he’s going through something that she briefly experienced as well. Yes, it turns out Vrataski had also once experienced the blood-induced time loop, one that allowed her her very first major victory before an injury and subsequent blood transfusion stripped her of her power. Can Gate avoid any major injuries before finding the Omega mother and end the alien invaders once and for all?
EDGE OF TOMORROW finds Tom Cruise smack-dab in the middle of an action renaissance after years of being something of a public (yet ever-profitable) punchline. The MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE film series had recently picked up steam again with Brad Bird’s 2011 entry GHOST PROTOCOL, and would only increase its acclaim through the next decade due to the directorial work of Christopher McQuarrie (one of the listed screenwriters for….EDGE OF TOMORROW! We’re in a loop!). In the 2010s, America had seemingly forgiven Cruise’s meltdown of the 00’s, contingent on him throwing himself off of planes and cliffs for our amusement.
In contrast with his runs as Ethan Hunt, however, EDGE OF TOMORROW initially finds Cruise in a position we don’t often see him in nowadays. He begins as a guy who runs from the danger, not towards it. As mentioned, he’s not even really a soldier. He’s a private-sector advertising guy, a PR man who has found himself the mouth-piece for a united world’s army almost by accident. The only reason he’s about to find himself in the middle of combat is due to his inability to charm (or blackmail) an imposing general (played in fantastic no-nonsense style by Brendan Gleeson).
In plain terms, William Cage is a coward, one of the last things you associate with Cruise roles over the past few decades.
Of course, even if this movie were a straight-forward adventure, it would stand to reason that the movie would end with Cage eventually becoming a hero. We basically know where EDGE OF TOMORROW is headed going in. Where the fun of the movie comes in is that time-loop gimmick, allowing us to literally see him learn how to be a hero through sheer trial and error. The initial day is set up perfectly with all kinds of ways the army’s attack goes wrong. The soldiers are cocky, too full of bravado. Cage has no idea what he’s doing, but because he’s been framed as a deserter, they refuse to train him. They’re ambushed. One soldier is crushed by a ship immediately. Rita is distracted and is killed fairly mercilessly, the world’s literal and symbolic leader destroyed. There are innumerous things that could have gone better, were the day only there to be done over again.
Enter Cage and his newly Alpha-infused blood.
Now, we get to watch him figure out how to fix all of this, starting with not coming across as a complete lunatic to the soldiers surrounding him (this turns out to be a difficult task). He spends day after day trying to solve every step of what went wrong. Does he save the doomed-to-be-crushed soldier, or is it a lost cause? How specific should he get with his marching instructions to Rita? Should he just run? Cage has to make a million decisions, but gets infinite lives in which to see them play out.
What I’m trying to say is that EDGE OF TOMORROW is a video game, dramatized to become a movie. This isn’t meant as an insult! On the contrary, the “video game” aspect is consistently the best part of the movie. It’s really fun watching Cage grinding away at this mission, failing in just about every way there is to fail. As he begins to explore the “world map” (when he and Rita finally leave the battlefield, it’s legitimately jarring), he starts discovering all kinds of different new items and vehicles, up to and including a helicopter. But all these things lead to new roadblocks: no matter how hard he tries, he can’t figure out a method for getting in the helicopter without leading to Rita’s death. Anybody who’s ever gotten stuck on a “level” can get his frustration here, as can anybody trying as hard as they can to master a new skill, like cooking or playing guitar.
EDGE OF TOMORROW is also very clever in how it uses its central gimmick. Sometimes the time loop is used to comic effect: his first attempt at rolling under an incoming truck to escape his regiment training results in him getting run over (life is all about the timing). Sometimes, it’s used for pathos: the toll of seeing Rita die over and over and over eventually starts to wear on Cage, especially as he begins to develop feelings for her. Sometimes, it’s used for both: it cannot be understated here how often EDGE OF TOMORROW features Blunt shooting Cruise in the face and/or head. It happens constantly. How can you not be entertained by that?
Beyond all of that, EDGE OF TOMORROW is way more fun that it has any right to be. The late, great Bill Paxton bolsters much of the first half of the movie as a hard-as-nails sergeant who I think is supposed to be from Kentucky, but often comes across as a threatening Foghorn Leghorn (again, this is not an insult). Cruise is obviously in his “movie star” second wind mode here, selling you on the journey from terrified to exasperated to (finally) stoic cool guy. However, it must be said how great and confident Blunt is in a role that could have come off as fairly generic in lesser hands, but instead becomes semi-iconic* in the hands of the most underrated movie star we have.
*”Iconic” is a phrase that has become wildly overused, but…all I’ll say is that when you Google “edge of tomorrow emily blunt gif”, it knows exactly what moment you’re looking for.
EDGE OF TOMORROW isn’t without its issues: it sheds its gimmick with about thirty minutes left to go, leaving the narrative to become a straight-forward action thriller, something it’s not quite prepared to be. The final fight is supported by a lot of the soldier characters from the first half that, frankly, hadn’t been developed enough for you to care about. Much of the action is also infuriatingly shot in the darkness, leaving you to only guess what might be going on. Finally, the “lore” behind the aliens, with all the Mimics, Alphas, and Omegas talk is vaguely non-sensical. The script is able to do what it can to explain the stakes from scene to scene, but if someone quizzed me right now on what precisely happened from moment to moment, I would fail.
But, who cares? We’re here to see Tom Cruise get trapped in the same day, with few resources besides charm, brain power and Emily Blunt to get himself out of it. We’re here to watch him submit to the grueling learning process. In that sense, EDGE OF TOMORROW remains one of the very few movies from the past ten-plus years to promise something satisfying and deliver on exactly that. For that, its legacy is secure.
(But, seriously, everybody, let’s figure out the movie’s title now.)