Super Mario Bros. fans: Remember when you found out how to get multiple 1-ups by meticulously bouncing on Koopa shells? Remember the exhilaration of knowing that with 99 lives you could keep trying things until you got it right and beat Bowser? Edge of Tomorrow is the movie version of that feeling—just with Tom Cruise. And aliens. And a kickass woman who is the hero instead of some stupid princess locked in a castle.
It's been said before—including by WIRED's own Angry Nerd—but Edge of Tomorrow, out today, might just be the best videogame movie not actually based on videogame. For years Hollywood has tried to make movies based on the games, from Resident Evil to Max Payne, but what director Doug Liman's movie proves is that they should've been based on videogames' narrative structure—the ability to continue after "Game Over" and discover something new. The joy of gaming is fighting a little further with every life, learning a little bit more about your enemy's weaknesses, until finally reaching victory.
(Spoiler alert: Minor spoilers for Edge of Tomorrow follow.)
Yes, this sounds a bit like Groundhog Day, or any other movie with a weird time-loop plot device. But what Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) has done with Edge of Tomorrow is surprisingly fresh. His Player One, Maj. William Cage (Cruise, turning in a oddly funny performance reminiscent of that super drunk scene in A Few Good Men), is a former advertising schmuck who is now trying to sell the world on enlisting mech-suited soldiers to fight off an alien invasion. When he gets sent to the front lines to fight his own damn war, he dies almost instantly (ain't that always the way when you fire up a new game?) only to realize the Mimic (alien) that killed him somehow gave him the power to respawn the day before the battle where he died.
For years Hollywood has tried to make movies based on the narrative of videogames, but what director Doug Liman's movie proves is that they should've been based on videogames' narrative structure.Cage, never a trained soldier, fails—and fails hard—until he meets a special forces hero named Rita Vrataski, who used to have unlimited lives and used them to win a massive victory on another front. The two train together (cue the montage!) in the hopes that they can find a way to survive the battle and destroy the big boss "Omega," thereby resetting everything and winning the war. (Mimics are like Chitauri: once they're disconnected from each other they power down like they just fell in K-hole.)
The thrill Liman has created here is in the pacing. Each scene runs just long enough for you to forget this isn't one continuous slog to the end. There's no permadeath, and this is an arcade with unlimited quarters, so unlike any other film where nerve-wracked audiences hope their hero won't die, we get to watch Cruise eat shit again and again. It's a brilliant plot device, but unlike super-cerebral time-travel movies where multiple plot threads are hard to keep straight, Edge of Tomorrow stays a straightforward action flick, with nail-biting battle scenes of alien war beginning to end.
The credit isn't entirely Liman's, of course. Aside from really smart editing, Edge of Tomorrow's narrative owes a debt to Japanese author Hiroshi Sakurazaka's book All You Need Is Kill, where the movie's respawn concept originated. But for all the places this gambit could've gone wrong or fallen flat, it doesn't. Liman's movie jumps so effortlessly from big-action set pieces to scenes of exposition about what the Mimics are and what they want (always essential to alien films) that Edge lets us catch our breath without slowing its pace.
It also doesn't hurt that Edge of Tomorrow makes some of the best use of Cruise we've seen in recent years (Stacee Jaxx notwithstanding). The arrival of a new Tom Cruise sci-fi or action flick has become about as frequent and regular as Christmas decorations in October. And while he's good at those, they quickly take on a "live, die, repeat" cycle of their own. But here Cruise throws a little Jerry Maguire into the mix, playing a guy who can talk himself out of anything except death-by-alien. He's a total un-hero, and he even gets a few LOLs.
More importantly, though, the hero is Emily Blunt, whose Rita is one of the better alien-annihilating heroines this side of Ripley. "Ripped ass-kicker" hasn't really been Blunt's thing up until this point but she's delightfully at ease with it and her performance makes the largely unnecessary will-they-or-won't-they romantic subplot largely bearable. She also gets to serve as the audience stand-in, taking just a little pleasure in "resetting" her costar every time he needs to die.
Of course, all of this raises the question: Where's the suspense when our main character can just start all over? To reveal how Edge sidesteps this landmine would give away too much, but let's just say this: By the time the flick hits its finale, it's as white-knuckle as fighting the final boss using your last guy.
Not to say the movie is without flaw. The romantic subplot is probably necessary just because, you know, people like having feelings at movies, but still feels tacked on. And the film's final resolution comes off as a bit too tidy. But those are minor nitpicks, and ultimately everything else about Liman's film is the epitome of a fun summer popcorn flick. However, where most blockbusters play out like a long race to the Big Finish, Edge of Tomorrow forges a new—and fun—road to get there.
