Movie Review by Nigel A. Messenger
Stars: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton
Director: Doug Liman
When you think of a movie where the premise is based around a day repeating itself again and again, the first thing most people would think of is GROUNDHOG DAY. Personally I also recall an episode of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION where the Enterprise gets caught up in a temporal anomaly and a particularly funny episode of STARGATE SG1, or even at least two TV series TRU CALLING and DAY BREAK whose whole scenario evolved around the subject of time repeating for one reason or another.
Some of these stories worked better than others, the weakness being the frustration of having to sit through essentially the same storyline over and over with varying degrees of change, but of course it essentially comes down to how well the story is told, acted and put on the screen as to how entertaining the film or TV show actually is.
EDGE OF TOMORROW enters the fray not only with a massive budget, one of the world’s biggest film stars Tom Cruise, a very hot Emily Blunt and an amazing display of VFX, but also a tense and original storyline. OK it’s an alien invasion, but using time resetting as a weapon, that’s an intriguing idea, how do you fight that… and more so, how do you make it interesting and exciting over and over again.
Well EDGE OF TOMORROW does make it interesting and exciting, an army guy who is in media relations, untrained in combat, taken out of his comfort zone and thrust into battle. Of course he doesn’t stand a chance and the film knows that and exploits that fact. It’s not ordinary guy, picks up a gun and does what everyone else can’t, including the fully trained military. This film gets the hero killed and quickly, that’s not a plot spoiler that’s the whole premise of this film, he just doesn’t stay dead, it’s time resetting, remember! He takes the enemies weapon, by accident, and uses it against them.
As a movie it works brilliantly. It’s an incredibly exciting film and although it’s reliving this day again and again and again, you actually don’t know what’s going to happen next, right up to the end of the picture.
