Edge of Tomorrow...

Yesterday, I watched the new Tom Cruise flick at my local theater...and suffice it to say, the movie was pretty darn entertaining. Edge of Tomorrow was a cross between Groundhog Day, Saving Private Ryan and Halo (plus Gears of War and essentially any other sci-fi video game you'll play on Xbox and Playstation). Clearly, the filmmaker was inspired by the D-Day landings of World War II (Edge of Tomorrow officially opened at theaters domestically on June 6, which marked the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy)...with the central plot revolving around how Cage (Cruise) and Rita (Emily Blunt) had to figure out a way to get their fellow soldiers off a French beach. This locale was a meat grinder as alien creatures known as Mimics (who came to Earth via asteroid and decimated much of Europe) mowed down the human invaders the same way the Germans mercilessly gunned down Allied troops trying to wade their way across the shores of Normandy in 1944. Of course, unlike the ultra-realistic but grim portrayal of D-Day in Private Ryan, there was a nice touch of humor as Cage desperately tried to survive the onslaught of Mimics charging at him on the battlefront—only to die and relive that moment over and over (which is where the Groundhog Day reference comes along) until he emerged victorious.



While Tom Cruise played the reluctant hero (unlike his fearless characters in other movies like say, Mission: Impossible and Jack Reacher) in Edge of Tomorrow, Emily Blunt showed just how comfortable she was in playing a bad-ass action hero who will do whatever she could to accomplish her objective. Also amusing in this film was Bill Paxton...who played a tough-as-nails master sergeant bent on making Cage pay for his initial attempt at deserting his army unit and avoiding the invasion of France. (Like in WWII, the Americans and British were amassing their forces in England and were going to strike at the extraterrestrials using the English Channel.) The Mimics looked pretty cool...with their designs reminiscent of the Sentinels from The Matrix trilogy, the Kaiju of Pacific Rim and the creatures known as Locusts from Gears of War. The special effects in Edge of Tomorrow were top-notch, and could've possibly earned this movie a Best Visual Effects Oscar nomination in 2015 if Godzilla, Transformers: Age of Extinction and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies weren't released this year.



All-in-all, Edge of Tomorrow was a fun and inventive sci-fi film. The story didn't lend itself to having a sequel, but Tomorrow was as entertaining (but not campy) a flick as 1997's Starship Troopers. Edge of Tomorrow was also similar to Battle: Los Angeles, but the humor that Cruise got to employ and the toughness of Blunt's character set their movie apart from 2011's action-disaster film. Here's hoping Tomorrow will find box office success during its theatrical run...it deserves it.