Talkie Tuesday: Edge of Tomorrow

"We should just reset."

Hello everyone!

So tonight's blog post is probably not going to be one of those sterling, praise-waxing I usually post. Then again, I usually kind of like the movies I watch, but every once in a while I run into one that I could have done without.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Obviously, tastes differ and some things just aren't for everyone, especially not with as many people as the world has on the surface.

But this surprised me because before I watched the movie the initial reviews and response was positive, largely so, although I will admit I haven't gone back to check whether or not it changed at all after I returned from my summer vacation (yes, this is still one of those from way back when, and hey look, it's almost Christmas too!)

Maybe I should have known it for what it was, but a good friend of mine raved about it and so I kept my hopes up. But Edge of Tomorrow absolutely failed to deliver in my opinion.

Now, alright.

Tom Cruise is a good actor, I will admit as much, and I do enjoy watching certain of his movies (Top Gun or The Last Samurai, anyone?), but there are also some where I believe he should have either passed them by, or I would have hoped they had never been made to begin with (I won't go into which those are). It has a higher rating on IMDB than Armageddon, and, trust me, the latter is MUCH better.

Edge of Tomorrow looked promising, because it had aliens, big booms, Emily Blunt, and Mad-Eye Moody.

Unfortunately, to me, that was about it.

What we learn at the very beginning is that a meteor crashed into Earth and delivered unto it 'mimicks', some type of alien creature that looks like a cross between Alien and Predator, and they aren't even that scary, visually at least. They're freaky because they move as fast as they do, though. 

And apparently they've killed a lot of people.

Cruise's character, Cage, is the media liaison for the united army of the world (there was a special title but I forgot it), and he makes the brilliant move of pissing off the General, who has him branded a deserter and tossed onto the front lines.

Yeah, I know. Harsh.

The fun begins when Cage dies on the battlefield ... only to wake again at the beginning of the same day. Things get trickier here as he keeps on dying, and reliving the same day over and over and over again. That is, until Rita Vrataski (Blunt's character) tells him that at that first day, he had killed an Alpha, which forced the Omega (the head honcho of these mimicks) to reset the whole day, only this time, because the Alpha's blood had touched Cage, he remembers it all.

From this point on, basically, Rita and Cage enter a high-speed videogame of trying to live through the day to get to the Omega so they can kill the bastard and end this. It certainly feels that way as they die so many times and just keep going back, always finishing at a higher level.

They do eventually realize that they're being played, so the plan changes as they steal some sort of device to help Cage access the Alpha's thoughts and get him to the Omega (not to mention he had been given a transfusion earlier and now if he dies, it's game over).

Unsurprisingly, they end up at the Louvre, where the Omega IS finally killed, even though everyone else around Cage died in the attempt.

He dies, too, but for some inexplicable reason he wakes up the day BEFORE he was sent to the front, with no one remembering anything except for him, and the mimicks have pretty much collapsed because of an explosion in Paris. Even Rita doesn't know a thing, so Cage just laughs - and life goes on.

I like movies and I like videogames, but I tend to like them separate, and the feeling I got with Edge of Tomorrow was pretty much like the one I had when I was a kid playing Tarzan on the computer: you have an infinite amount of lives and you can just keep going back until you solve the puzzle and stop dying. About an hour of the movie, in my opinion, could have been cut out entirely with no big loss, as it certainly contributed nothing to the story but repetition on repetition.

By the end of it, although I liked the original premise, I was just so fed up with the whole feel of the thing that I lost all enjoyment in it. It became two hours of my life I could have easily spent elsewhere, and better (like, on the beach with a cocktail in my hand).

This was certainly not Cruise's or Blunt's best work, I must say, and while certain aspects were definitely good, the majority was just not good enough to salvage it.

xx

*images and video not mine