Among other things, “Edge of Tomorrow” is a movie that slyly teaches you how to watch it. The screenplay was adapted from Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s much-lauded 2004 novel “All You Need Is Kill” by Christopher McQuarrie, who knows his way around a mind-bending mystery scenario (“The Usual Suspects”), and by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, who previously worked with Liman on “Fair Game.” Crucially, the scribes have solved the problem of how not to make the film play like a repetitive slog aided enormously by James Herbert and Laura Jennings’ snappy, intuitive editing, they tell their story in a breezy narrative shorthand (and at times, sleight-of-hand), transforming what must surely be an unbelievably tedious gauntlet for our hero into a deft, playful and continually involving viewing experience. Every time he dies, the clock is reset and he gets another chance to reshape the future, though it will take many, many replays before he learns how to navigate this particular cinematic videogame - where dying is as harmless as it is in “Candy Crush,” if rather more painful - and reach the elusive next level. To his utter disbelief (although audiences will suspend theirs easily enough), Cage awakens to find that the day has started all over again, and once more he must attempt to talk his way out of the situation, get dropped into battle and try to survive the bloodbath on the beach as long as he can. Through sheer dumb luck, Cage does manage to destroy one particularly ugly, oversized Mimic, only to lose his own life when he gets a faceful of the creature’s highly corrosive blood. It’s hardly an accident that the setting immediately evokes Normandy, and while what follows isn’t exactly the opening sequence from “Saving Private Ryan,” it’s a brutal massacre all the same: The humans are gravely outnumbered, and even UDF’s star soldier, the tough-as-hell Rita (Emily Blunt), is killed in the onslaught. Brigham (Brendan Gleeson, at his most hardass and no-nonsense) orders him into the front lines of battle, even going so far as to arrest him when he tries to wriggle his way out.ĭespite Cage’s vigorous protests to his commanding officer (a fine Bill Paxton) that there’s been some mistake, his fate is sealed: Strapped into bulky metal combat gear and equipped with high-grade weaponry that he has no clue how to operate, Cage, along with his fellow soldiers, is deployed from London and deposited, none too gently, on a French beach, where a fiery humans-vs.-Mimics battle is raging at full force. Introduced as a smiling representative of the United Defense Force, an enormous military operation designed to defend Earth against a nearly invincible alien race known as Mimics, Cage is a figurehead, not a fighter, which his why he’s so dumbfounded when Gen. William Cage (Cruise) must spend the better part of “Edge of Tomorrow” learning to unlock the ruthless soldier within. That’s a shame, because this enjoyably gimmicky entertainment is not only one of Cruise’s better recent efforts, it’s also arguably the most purely pleasurable film Doug Liman has directed in the 12 years since “The Bourne Identity.” And just as the amnesiac hero of that movie had to gradually get back in touch with his inner killing machine, so the initially hapless, aptly named Maj.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |