Edge of Tomorrow (2014) Directed by Doug Liman. Written by Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth, based on the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and illustrator Yoshitoshi Abe. Starring Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, and Brendan Gleeson.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: All You Need Is Kill is a superior title. They shouldn’t have changed it.
The novel All You Need Is Kill was first published in 2004, written by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and illustrated by Yoshitoshi Abe. In its initial form, it’s an illustrated light novel—a fairly short novel aimed at a teen or young adult audience. It has been adapted, translated, and released a few different times since then, including a manga adaptation written by Ryōsuke Takeuchi and illustrated by Takeshi Obata (you might recognize Obata’s artistic style from Death Note) and an English graphic novel written by Nick Mamatas and illustrated by Lee Ferguson.
This is a pretty normal life cycle for a light novel; they are often wildly popular, widely read, and get adapted multiple times into manga, anime, and other formats. A somewhat less normal stage of the life cycle is an adaptation into a big-budget Hollywood movie from a major studio, starring one of the biggest movie stars of all time.
That’s not usually how it goes, but I’m glad it did in this case, because I love this movie. I was one of the many people who only saw it because of the very long tail of word-of-mouth buzz that continued years after its somewhat lackluster release, which means I have also transformed into one of those people who flails around and says, “No, really, go watch it, it’s great, trust me.”
All You Need Is Kill caught the attention of Hollywood after it was translated into English and published by Viz Media (the company behind many English-language manga publications) in 2009. What followed is a typically convoluted Hollywood production story: an insane amount of money thrown around on spec, input and rewrites from one million writers (only a slight exaggeration; I counted at least eight), the inevitable reimagining of the main character when they cast a fifty-something actor instead of the book’s twenty-something young man, nine companies working on the special effects, and a filming schedule that was well underway before they figured out how the movie would end.
Edge of Tomorrow follows the story of William Cage (Tom Cruise), an ad exec turned military PR shill who spends his time recruiting people into the multinational force that is fighting against—and very badly losing to—an alien invasion. Due to a series of contrivances and shenanigans on the part of a general (played by Brendan Gleeson), he is placed with the front-line infantry under the command of the most-clichéd-master-sergeant-ever, Master Sergeant Farell (Bill Paxton, having fun chewing all the scenery). It’s the eve of what everybody hopes will be a decisive battle against the aliens, and Cage has no idea what he’s doing. He doesn’t even know how to use the armored battle suit they stick him into.
The aliens are called Mimics thanks to their uncanny ability to predict and counter everything the human forces do—which is exactly what happens at this big battle. The Mimics know the attack is coming. It immediately turns into an all-out slaughter. Cage dies within minutes.
Then he wakes up a day in the past and does it all again. All the usual time loop elements are here: Cage tries to tell others what’s going on, he tries to change the outcome, he tries to survive the battle. Things only really change a few loops in, after a battlefield encounter with star soldier Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt). Right before they both die, she tells him to find her when he wakes up—because she knows about the time looping. It turns out she’s already been through what he’s going through, and that’s why she was able to make such a heroic showing at a previous battle.
Time loop stories tend to fall into two broad categories: those that never explain the mechanism and those that do. Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day (1993) is the type specimen of the first kind, those time loop stories where the how of the time loop is not really relevant. Edge of Tomorrow sits at the opposite end of the spectrum, where the science fictional mechanism causing the time loop is a major pillar of the plot. The sci fi details are actually dispatched pretty quickly: Vrataski and her physicist friend Carter (Noah Taylor) explain that the Mimics are able to control time, which is how they have managed to trounce humanity so soundly during their invasion. When Cage, like Vrataski before him, killed a certain type of Mimic, the alien’s blood gave him the ability to loop time as well. The finer details are not important for our purposes here, and I’m not sure I would be able to explain them without resorting to alpha/omega jokes. What matters is that they have to kill the main Mimic, the big boss who can reset time for the aliens’ advantage, in order to save Earth from the invasion.
Here’s the thing about this movie: None of this is particularly new or deep or innovative. But it doesn’t matter because it’s such great fun. It’s such a fun movie to watch. It’s fast-paced, frenetic, and funny. Director Doug Liman had developed his action movie style on The Bourne Identity (2002) and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), so Edge of Tomorrow’s mix of serious and silly feels like a natural evolution. The action—and it’s pretty much all action, start to finish—combines moments of visceral, Saving Private Ryan-style horrors of war with moments of pure slapstick hilarity. The aliens are nicely creepy, the science fictional elements explored only as much as they need to be, and the time loops never stick on any particular repetition long enough to outstay their welcome.
There are a few specific things, I think, that make this film work so well. The first is that it utilizes the combination of CGI and practical effects pretty well, thanks to the work of visual effects supervisor Nick Davis. Because, yes, the movie was filmed almost entirely against green screen, and it is obvious in places—but there are enough practical elements mixed in there that give it the right sort of weight when necessary. For example, the armored suits are real costumes, the actors are actually wearing them, and a lot of work went in to making them look and feel like what real armored suits would look like if aliens invaded in 2015 and the world’s militaries had been desperately throwing untrained infantry at them for five miserable years. They look bulky, clunky, and uncomfortable because they were bulky, clunky, and uncomfortable. There were models for the alien Mimics, but for the most part the movie specifically avoids showing the aliens with many close or lingering shots. We aren’t given a chance to understand the alien anatomy because the characters don’t get that chance.
It makes the fight scenes chaotic and hard to follow, but that’s the point. For all that Sergeant Farell waxes rhapsodic about the purifying crucible of war, there is nothing elegant or meaningful or glorious about this battle. It’s a shitshow. It’s a disaster. The humans get slaughtered in every single time loop. The only way Cage and Vrataski survive is to escape the battlefield. The fact that the aliens exist almost entirely as impossibly fast bursts of whiplike tentacles, without providing us or the characters much more to focus on, helps to emphasize the futility of trying to beat them in direct combat.
That brings me to the second thing that makes this movie work so well, and that’s it wholehearted embrace of video game structure as a storytelling method. Both Sakurazaka and Liman have mentioned being inspired by the dying and respawning device of video games, and it shows in how the time loops are utilized. It’s most obvious in the scenes when Cage and Vrataski are trying to figure out how to escape the battle on the beach to reach the dam where they believe the omega Mimic is hidden; anybody who has ever had fifty tries at a particularly grueling boss battle in a video game will recognize the fussy, frustrating process as they discuss how they have to step this way and dodge that way.
For all that people love to dismiss many blockbuster action movies as being too much like video games, capturing that feeling deliberately and using it to the film’s advantage is actually quite rare and challenging. In this movie, it’s obvious that a lot of thought went into deciding how much of each loop to show, how to portray the progression of the action, how to vary the tone to balance the humor and darkness—and, most importantly, how to use all of those elements to tell an engaging story that leads to a satisfying conclusion. It works because the filmmakers recognize that the stylized action and mechanics are part of what make video games appealing, but the storytelling is just as important. Looking cool isn’t enough. The audience has to want to go along for the ride to find out what happens next.
Liman started filming the movie without really knowing how to approach it or having any idea how it would end. Apparently this is not unusual for him; he has a reputation for making it up as he goes along. And screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie has talked about discussions with Liman and Cruise where they went back and forth on how to end the movie. Most stages of writing had a much darker ending, and it wasn’t until they decided to embrace the humor inherent in the premise that they settled on what is a pretty bright and optimistic ending. Cruise was a particular advocate for going all-in on the Wile E. Coyote-style violence in his character’s many, many deaths. I think it works, because I think the humor is one of the movie’s best features, and because giving the main character and the world a happy ending, even in the context of that one final time loop reset, doesn’t mean none of the story happened.
And that brings me to the third and final thing I want to talk about, which is the casting of the main characters. I don’t know what Edge of Tomorrow would look like if different actors had been cast in the lead roles, but I’m glad we never had to find out, because Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt are freaking perfect and a huge part of why the movie is so great.
Look, we all know that when you cast Tom Cruise in a movie, you are going to have a Tom Cruise movie, no matter what it’s about, no matter who directs it, no matter how well-written the plot and character are. This has been true for decades. It’s what happens when you have a blockbuster movie star who has spent much of his career defining what it even means to be a blockbuster movie star. The fact that Cruise is actually a very good actor often feels irrelevant; nobody can ever forget who they are watching on screen. But what’s fun about Edge of Tomorrow is about how it uses those decades of moviegoing expectation as part of how we experience we story. Expecting an action hero? The character we meet is a smarmy, pathetic coward. Expecting cool, badass moves? He dies in so many stupid ways it’s hard to keep track. Expecting him to save the world? Well, eventually, but he has to earn it.
The counterpoint to Cruise’s character is Emily Blunt’s stone-cold badass Rita Vrataski. She’s absolutely fantastic, and there is additional cleverness in casting an actor who was not at the time known for or expected to showcase action or badassery at all. Vrataski had to earn her skills, the same way Cage has to earn his, but all of that happens off-screen, before the movie begins. It’s a familiar action movie trope for the badass character to have a traumatic backstory that informs the current action, although it’s not always so direct as it is here. Part of what makes or breaks such characters is whether we can believe that past without directly seeing it. We believe it here because Blunt is so good at showcasing Vrataski’s hope and fear and grief and frustration and everything else that comes from getting an unexpected second chance, however slight, to win the war.
The movie also does well in developing a rapport between the characters even when their connection is, thanks to the time loop, not quite one-sided but strongly imbalanced. It works because we’ve got two great actors carrying the film—which is, all in all, very well made and a lot of fun.
As I was rewatching this movie, and enjoying it just as much as I did the first time, I was thinking about how glad I am that I picked this to start out the new year. There will be plenty of time for us to dig into all the sci fi movies out there that have deeper messages and more complex themes. For now, I’m happy to enjoy a film that embraces the fun and the spectacle of sci fi cinema. Edge of Tomorrow is a movie that that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do, which is nothing more and nothing less than making us laugh and gasp and worry and cheer our way through an alien invasion. And I love that.
What do you think of Edge of Tomorrow? Where does it rank for you among that odd little subgenre of movies that use video game mechanics to tell a story? Has anybody read the original light novel or any of the translations and adaptions?
Next week: We’re falling into some timey-wimey confusion on an entirely different scale with Nacho Vigalondo’s low-budget Spanish film Timecrimes. Watch it on Hoopla, Amazon, Tubi, Apple, and others.
