![]() ![]() ![]() “Battle is a true redeemer,” barks Paxton’s sarge at his men “tomorrow morning you will be baptised. Seemingly throwaway lines accrue layers of meaning as Cage relives, and relives, these two days. McQuarrie and the Butterworths have crafted a rich and drily witty script that really takes the edges off the concept. ![]() If this all sounds as mechanical as the exo-suits Cage and his comrades wear, don’t be put off. Having mastered the timing of a roll between a truck’s wheels in one amusing and novel sequence, he is rewarded with access to a trainer (Emily Blunt as seasoned soldier Rita Vrataski) who not only provides him with the necessary information to progress to new ‘levels’, but also enables him to ‘spend’ his ‘experience points’ in her automated dojo. Then part of it is through a more straightforward regime of personal improvement - or ‘levelling up’ - which comes via Cage ‘unlocking new content’. Part of this is through his power of recollection, plus development of muscle-memory: step left to avoid explosion here, shoot right to eliminate incoming mimic there - every repeated battle is pre-programmed, so he just has to learn the patterns. (If you’ve ever sunk days of playtime into a Dark Souls game, you’re guaranteed to sympathise.) With each replay, he must learn how to survive to reach the next ‘level’ (to ultimately meet the end-of-game boss), although, paradoxically, just as we learn from our mistakes in life, he must learn from his deaths. When, eventually, a close encounter on that bloody beach with a tentacle-flailing, blast-furnace mouthed “alpha” - the end-of-level boss - causes his health bar to retract to zero, we snap back to that save point, and he must ‘play’ the two days again. When Cage (Cruise) awakens into the first day of his enforced demotion (also the second-to-last of his life), he is effectively starting from a save point. Lay the film’s plot over a game-design template and you’ll find a pleasingly neat match. It may not have spawned directly from any console-based IP, but it is thoroughly steeped in gaming culture and logic - mainly via Sakurazaka himself, who is also a programmer. While we still await an even remotely decent video game-to-movie adaptation, Edge Of Tomorrow provides the perfect substitute. ![]() This is in no small part to the movie’s most significant influence of all: video games. Why else enlist the ever-reliable Bill Paxton as a puff-chested, adage-chewing sergeant if not to wink at his past life as a colonial marine? Edge Of Tomorrow may be hugely familiar, but welcomingly so. None of which is to diminish Empire’s recommendation: director Doug Liman and his screenwriting triumvirate of Christopher McQuarrie and brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (adapting Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s light novel All You Need Is Kill) wear all these influences well, and with pride. It’s exquisitely apposite that, if you’re coming to this film from a healthy upbringing on action-sci-fi cinema of the ’80s and ’90s (with Harold Ramis’ clock-resetting comedy being the one rom-com it was okay for you to love), you’ll experience a throbbing sense of déjà vu - only made more acute by the film’s shared chromosomes with last year’s Elysium and that other Tom Cruise-on-a-devastated-Earth picture, Oblivion. Brush your hand across its gritty surface and you’ll smear the thin layer off a teeming nest of influences: Groundhog Day, the most obvious, for its time-loop plot engine (and by extension Source Code) Saving Private Ryan, for its French-beach brutality Aliens, Starship Troopers and the Matrix trilogy for its bombastic portrayal of big-tech conflict with multi-limbed, insectoid-biomechanical extra-terrestrials. On the face of it, there is nothing particularly original about Edge Of Tomorrow. ![]()
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