Cruise flick feels vaguely familiar
Print Edition
THE time-shifting sci-fi thriller “Edge of Tomorrow” has encapsulated what it is to be a summertime moviegoer. We’re dropped into a battlefield of digital effects with the fate of the world at stake. Torrents of gunfire and explosions surround. Some alien clonks us over the head. We black out and it all happens again. And again.
But “Edge of Tomorrow,” in which Tom Cruise plays an officer who continually relives a day of combat against extraterrestrials — think “Groundhog Day” with guns — isn’t a commentary on the repetitiveness of today’s blockbusters even though its star, after all, has been the unchanging, unstoppable avatar of big summer movies.
But in the film directed by Doug Liman (“Swingers,” “The Bourne Identity”), the action-star persona of Cruise is put into a phantasmagorical blender. As military marketer Major William Cage, he’s thrown into battle against his will by an unsympathetic general, the excellent Brendan Gleeson, and then finds himself stuck in a mysterious time loop.
Cruise dies dozens of times, often in comical ways. Does this sound like a great movie, or what?
The selling point of “Edge of Tomorrow” may indeed be seeing one of Hollywood’s most divisive icons reduced to Wile E. Coyote. He’s like a real-life version of the video game “Contra,” with the code of seemingly endless life. Dying again and again, Cruise has rarely been so likable.
Based on the 2004 Japanese novella “All You Need Is Kill,” “Edge of Tomorrow” begins in the de rigueur fashion of news clips that catch us up on five years of alien invasion that has encompassed Europe and left the beaches of northern France as the primary point of battle.
Cage is dumped on an aircraft carrier, callously sent into battle by a commanding officer, a very fun Bill Paxton, and outfitted in a high-tech exoskeleton he doesn’t know how to operate. When he lands on Normandy or thereabouts, he’s an easy target for the aliens, dubbed Mimics.
Among countless sequels and remakes, “Edge of Tomorrow” — both a Tom Cruise celebration and parody — is the right kind of a rerun.
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