Imagine being forced to replay the worst day of your life over and over again. Something of this Sisyphean fate is promised to Major Cage (Tom Cruise), who awakes each morning to a jagged whirr of helicopter blades and the acid militaristic order, “on your feet, maggot!” Cage is living through the fifth year of the extraterrestrial conquest of Earth. Europe has already fallen to the Mimics: savage aliens who look like a psychotic splurge of lion, octopus and arachnid. Each day Cage awakes into a Groundhog Nightmare. His rank and identity documents have been erased and he has been forcefully conscripted into the frontlines of battle. As no one believes him, he’s forced into a private amnesia and left to figure out the riddle of this elastic day which resets videogame-like each time he dies. Each day, he suits up into a mech exoskeleton with his fellow born-to-dies and flies out to Normandy’s shores of carnage, where the alien threat quickly turns each one into a scramble of guts and metal. Die. Rinse. Repeat.
Some critics have called Edge of Tomorrow part of Cruise’s “post-Oprah comeback” and certainly, the middle-aged couch-jumper has brought the lippy curve of his Jerry Maguire smile back into play, after a few years of setting his facial expression in concrete (see his muscle-tensed mug in another gorgeously pointless sci-fi, Oblivion). Cruise is actually funny in Edge, sometimes remarkably so, and the film is at least smart enough to take the piss out of itself in self-reflexive moments of comic outburst. It’s a shame that while it starts out as a mesmeric puzzle of a movie, with Cage having to accumulate fragments of memory over the repetitions of the day and use them to make sense of his predicament, the third act predictably lurches into a CG-powered abattoir of special effects. The laugh-inducing cleverness of the plot succumbs to the old Hollywood aphorism: (s)laughter is the best medicine. In its defence, the film makes statements of oblivion in a thrilling aesthetic register – skeleton husks of dead warrior adorn the French beaches, rockets explode in a fireworks of mortal extinction.
But the film is notthat clever. This isn’t science fiction as much as fictional science. The time-loop dynamic is frankly Ground-hogwash. And once again, it’s possible to read this imagined tomorrow as yet another allegory for the fantasies of masculine aggression which empower U.S. foreign policy.
Thankfully, Cage quickly learns that the aliens have an Achilles’ heel the size of a minor province lurking in the underground parking lot of the Louvre. Together with war heroine Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), cutely dubbed the “Full Metal Bitch”, he wages an assault against the alien central nervous system, the death of which will happily eject him from his circular destiny. It’s great that Edge has a playful and ironic attitude toward the tired tropes of battle cinema. But by sacrificing wit for a fattened kill ratio, it becomes as repetitive as its premise.