Now available on most streaming services, the
oddly named Edge of Tomorrow—how can
tomorrow have an edge?—succeeds as an old fashioned summer action movie. The
film features a video game style plot, reminds us of Tom Cruise’s charisma, and
balances Cruise’s excesses with dark humor and a physically superior Emily
Blunt.
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| Cruise, Blunt, that giant paddle thing, what's not to like? |
Edge of Tomorrow purees video games, Groundhog Day, Saving Private Ryan, and alien invasion movies into
one mostly coherent plot. Cruise plays a PR flack for the army assigned to
cover a Normandy style invasion against alien invaders. After unsuccessfully
trying to blackmail a general (Brendan Gleeson) to get out of the assignment,
Cruise winds up as a foot soldier on the front lines. The invasion fails and
Cruise dies, but he manages to steal the aliens’ secret power—he can reset the
day of the invasion over and over. Cruise meets Rita (Emily Blunt), the “Angel
of Verdun,” who once had and lost the same ability. The two team up with a
scientist and plot expediter (Noah Taylor), to defeat the alien invasion. You
can guess how the film goes from there. The film’s World War 2 analogies are as
subtle as a hammer to the head. The invasion emanated from Germany, the
Russians (and Chinese!) are fighting on the Eastern front (presumably so the
West can later ignore their contributions), the Allies (known as the United Defense
Force) launch their invasion 5 years into the war, and land in NORMANDY.
The
film relies on Cruise’s charisma to
carry the film. He possesses an impressive ability to command the screen. At
the beginning of the film, he’s cocky, smarmy, and a little full of himself. So
he’s Tom Cruise. Then he dies, again and again. Whether we love or hate him, he
dies for us. His deaths elicit our sympathy and our laughter. The first time
he’s killed his face melts. After each death, Cruise is reborn, again and again.
The smug asshole transforms into a man desperate to survive. Every time he
dies, Cruise gets a little smarter, a little better. He keeps trying and
failing to save humanity from alien invaders who look a lot like those robot
things from the Matrix movies. By the
end of the film, Cruise succeeds, flashing that brash smile from Top Gun. Love him or hate him, he lives
to entertain his audience—even desperately so.
Edge of
Tomorrow recognizes that Cruise works best by giving him a powerful woman
to play off of. Instead of relegating Blunt to the role of damsel in distress,
she proves superior to Cruise in most ways. Having already been through the
same experience, she’s initially a step ahead of him. She trains Cruise up to
fighting strength and seems to enjoy shooting him in the head over and over to
reset the day. There’s an obligatory kiss between the two of them, but it’s not
horribly off putting. She offers a physicality and hard assed attitude that
prevents Cruise’s charisma from reducing her to a sideshow.
Edge of Tomorrow succeeds because it
remembers that the first duty of a summer movie is to entertain. Instead of moving
plot in a franchise, trying to set up a new franchise, or making catchy pop
culture references, the film just tries to be entertaining. It mines a lot of
dark humor from killing Cruise in so many different ways. His exacerbation at
the whole situation becomes our outlet for laughter. His face melts, he gets
run over by trucks, shot in the head by Emily Blunt, crushed by crashing planes,
and gets a hole blown in his chest. But he wakes up again yesterday and it’s
all okay. In the end, humanity triumphs, Cruise gets to be himself, and we all
walk away happy. What’s wrong with that?
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