The trailers do the film a disservice, and not just because we barely see anything in them beyond the first half hour—The Edge of Tomorrow is decisively not The Twilight Zone meets Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day. It’s very much its own animal, and one that’s relentlessly ambitious. It’s a genre busting opus, one part alien invasion, one part mecha fantasy, and one part time travel. Liman and his multiple screenwriters (Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth) refuse to settle, and the result is a visual sprawl that extends every bit as far as the complex story. Adapted from Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s light novel, All You Need Is Kill, the story follows Major William Cage, a military man by name only, and his mind-bending flight through time. More specifically, every time he dies, he wakes up exactly a day before. Same place, same time. The mechanics of the world slowly become clear, but The Edge of Tomorrow is in no rush. The centerpiece of the film is a D-Day like skirmish between the British military, which now uses gigantic exo-skeleton power suits that turn each soldier into a superweapon, and the alien force. We learn Emily Blunt’s famous special forces soldier Rita Vrataski is necessary for any kind of human victory, but the circumstances surrounding her character will not be spoiled here.





Instead of beginning the film with a bang and forcing us into the action prematurely, we have to wait. This is the first of many instances reminiscent of the classic action movie, where the audience is forced to experience the action through the tunnel vision of a protagonist. If Major William Cage isn’t called into action, neither are we. The film begins with a series of newsreel clips, detailing the exploits of the human-alien war with a sly smile that avoids the over-seriousness of recent blockbusters. The alien monsters are deliberately avoided in the opening newsreel montage—once again, we have to wait. We sit in suspense, and instead of contriving early action scenes, we meet the characters. For a film of this size, it’s impressive they’re all we need to get invested. Tom Cruise combines all aspects of his persona to play Cage, borrowing little bits of gold from each of his performances to deliver one of his glimmering best. He always plays an everyman, but here he plays a coward. He’s scared of battle—terrified—and we can’t blame him. I didn’t. I would be too.









Cruise plays vulnerability well, and his character’s development is told through the visual rather than incremental disruptions of exposition. Cruise’s physicality slowly evolves throughout, and he shows a level of subtlety rare in his catalogue of intense characters. It’s visual storytelling first, and dialogue second. We follow the action; it isn’t told to us. It’s just as well, since the speech from the script dances between unnatural and goofy. As Cage keeps dying and resetting his life to the same spot, he learns more about what’s happening to him, why, and what he has to do. It’s in Cage’s arc that the film finds its surest footing. The premise is perpetually expanding. Once you fall into a particular rhythm or routine, the film breaks the pattern, and by the time you get used to the new one, it does it again. Cage’s goals are in a constant state of reinvention. The film evolves past you, and it finds increasingly daring ways to upend audience expectations. One of them is humor, and it’s so well placed it’s as though the filmmakers have a pulse for when we might get bored.