Edge of Tomorrow

It’s a testament to something that Doug Liman has used footage from the 24-hour-news cycle as a prologue to his last two films: Fair Game (2010), the story of the Bush regime’s persecution of Iraq War dissenter Valerie Plame, and the new Edge of Tomorrow, which is about an alien invasion that throws Tom Cruise for a time loop. With a face that could set the white balance, Cruise’s talking head looks perfectly natural floating above the word “expert” in the CNN chyron. The primped uniform on his person belongs to Major William Cage, who is shilling victory to the viewing public in the form of suits of armor that turn soldiers into inverted Terminators: buggy exoskeletons with soft human innards. Forgive me if I’m being glib, but when Cage transitions—by virtue of a janky, somewhat implausible device—from his on-camera cable sinecure to conscription into active duty and combat and thence into the movie’s stripped-for-action Groundhog Day scenario, it’s like he’s going from one pernicious loop to another.

Whether I’m being glib or not, Edge of Tomorrow has been graced with an intelligence that makes such readings more than idle or perverse. Source Code teased the military-industrial complex into the time-warp formula; but never, to my reckoning, has it been allied with the notion of “endless war,” or the trench-war futility of World War I, which the writers (Christopher McQuarrie and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, from a graphic novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka) overtly cite. Their intelligence finds a rare partner in optimism—a disposition that has become largely, perhaps systematically, outmoded in the summer-blockbuster form—and which possibly accounts for the blammo cyberpunk D-Day reenactment. In a way, the film is a superhero origin story on themes from Malcolm Gladwell: a spray of gunk spurs Cage’s change from weasel to warrior, but it’s the 10,000 hours of boot camp he gets from Rita (Emily Blunt) that makes him an authentic hero. 

Rita is the Morpheus to Cage's Neo, but has to be reminded of this each time he resets the game clock. Rita used to have Cage’s power to relive the previous day every time she died in battle; the aliens have used time travel as their secret weapon all along, but inadvertently surrender their control over it whenever they bleed on an opponent. With each resurrection, Rita learned from her mistakes; this led to her winning the home team’s only victory, as well as the monikers “Angel of Verdun” and “Full-Metal Bitch.” But once she lost the power, which is undone by transfusions of measly old human blood, the ball was back in the aliens' court. Blunt gives Rita substance; she challenges Cruise, and the pathos might have been overwhelming had Cage not been shaped to his persona, and made to give off the vibe of a marketing guru who lives to give TED talks. Cage is at a perpetual disadvantage because Rita’s default is to be dismissive of him, and he’s a stranger after every reboot. Damaged by her own failures, she’s too focused on the mission to notice, as we do, how weary he is of watching her die.

The film's impressively executed video-game structure impinges on its human material in only one significant way: Cage knows he has an out—intentionally getting injured in the field to re-up on muggle blood—but he never threatens to call it quits, never thinks to ask, beg, plead “Why me?” (In Casablanca, by contrast, Bogart had to be won over; though I suppose that, even in 1942, defying Nazism didn’t have quite the same urgency as saving the human race from extinction.) Edge of Tomorrow isn’t morally complex, like Looper; one never needs to step back and question whether the war being waged is just, even if the filmmakers are sneakily indulging in a liberal-fantasy sequel to The Unknown Knowns by putting a war hawk’s money where his beak is. It's true that the climax doesn't quite live up to the ingenuity of the first two acts, but even this sequence carries a residue of the movie’s strengths: the climactic battle requires drawing on a reserve of minor characters who’d been left dangling in past hours of the repeating day, and allotting each a heroic moment. The thinking that informs this—complete as it is with an ethnic grab-bag of “little people”—was molded by Old Hollywood cheese. But reflexive goodwill seems more refreshing to me coming as a ray piercing through clouds of cynicism than it might on a blindingly sunny day, and I think the filmmakers’ craftsmanship is an outgrowth of their optimism. If this off-brand blockbuster isn’t considered a success, the fault is not in our stars: It’s a testament to Cruise and Blunt that they believed in this movie. The filmmakers seem to have the romantic notion that audience involvement is worth painstaking work and the risk of financial failure. They rise to the audience’s challenge, just as Cruise does Blunt’s.