Edge of Tomorrow

It’s a cryin’ shame, because Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomor­row is a gnat’s whisker away from being a pret­ty damn decent movie. Robust. Like a sec­ond-hand Vol­vo. One lady own­er. Hav­ing worked through its cen­tral con­cept to the point where it can right­ful­ly get frisky, it hints towards an inter­locked tragedy of earth-shat­ter­ing (i.e. humane) pro­por­tions. But, anoth­er, more stock tragedy sur­faces, and the long, straight path to medi­oc­rity is tak­en with both­er­some gus­to. It is the film’s ulti­mate curse: genre.

That is to say, reflex expec­ta­tion means that there’s only one way this film can end, and it duly con­cedes to any and all pre­de­ter­mined notions. It even boasts a coda which is the cin­e­mat­ic equiv­a­lent of being swad­dled in a pre-warmed, extra-soft blue blanky. Plus, it’s a film which goes out of its way to sim­pli­fy a poten­tial­ly com­plex struc­ture, and while that helps to keep the pace up, it means that any­thing remote­ly strange (read: inter­est­ing) is explained away with toad­y­ing rapidity.

The future, and the plan­et has been besieged by an alien race known as Mim­ics. Bizarrely, the nomen­cla­ture has no obvi­ous log­ic to it, as these crea­tures don’t appear to be mim­ic­k­ing any­thing, except light­ning-quick cephalo­pod ver­sions of Tet­suo: The Iron Man. Tom Cruise plays a lily-liv­ered army desert­er… Repeat: Tom Cruise plays a lily-liv­ered army desert­er who, some­what inevitably, man­ages to over­come his fears and, well, you know the rest…

But the con­cept is inter­est­ing, bor­row­ing its nar­ra­tive chas­sis from Harold Ramis’ Ground­hog Day, engine from Back to the Future, shell from Source Code and all the option­al extras from any old clapped out space alien shoot-em-up you care to name. Afflict­ed with the abil­i­ty to relive the same day over-and-over, La Cruise must take the entire war effort onto his not immod­est shoul­ders and dis­cov­er the per­mu­ta­tion which results vic­to­ry. Added lips­mack­ing prospect: each failed attempt leads to his vio­lent death.

Far from min­ing the melan­choly prospect of time’s pas­sage being reduced to a cycli­cal spi­ral, Edge of Tomor­row in fact plays like the ulti­mate video game trib­ute movie, in that Liman recre­ates the expe­ri­ence of a char­ac­ter los­ing lives ad infini­tum and being instant­ly reviv­i­fied until the job is done and the final boss is oblit­er­at­ed. In the process, he has the occa­sion­al bit of fun, liv­ing out the audience’s every fan­ta­sy by cast­ing Cruise as a kind of human pin-cush­ion and hav­ing him, say, ground to a shiny-toothed mulch by the wheels of a Humvee.

Yet, the film doesn’t quite encroach on the ter­ri­to­ry of self-depre­ci­a­tion, as Cruise always seems to per­ish just out of shot or at the moment of a hard cut. This can be explained away by the time-trav­el plot mechan­ic, but it serves to dis­tance the film fur­ther from being about any­thing of real sub­stance. There’s a beau­ti­ful shot at the mid-point, in which she-bitch help-meet, Emi­ly Blunt, dies in front of Tom’s eyes for the umpteenth time, and the cam­era lingers on here sal­low, comatose face for a few beats. It’s a shame, as the film con­tin­ues in a man­ner which sug­gests Liman thought the painful accep­tance of mor­tal­i­ty was the throw­away nugget, while the the­mat­ic heft is mined from killing space aliens.

That moment – that tiny flick­er – does give Cruise’s mis­sion a scin­til­la of cred­i­bil­i­ty, as it marks the point where his eter­nal­ly ardu­ous efforts are less focused towards sav­ing the face­less mass­es, and more about how he is now out to pre­serve the life of this lone angel. It’s supe­ri­or genre fare, but man­ages to elude great­ness due to Liman’s con­stant­ly muffed direc­tion and its fail­ure to see the real tragedy that’s right in front of its eyes.