Edge of Tomorrow (2014)


Fall Movie Season is upon us and -yes- the movies are now going to be considerably better. In the next few months you're going to see for yourself how great movies like "Whiplash", "Foxcatcher", "Nightcrawler", "Gone Girl" and many more truly are- However, that doesn't mean there weren't solid movies in the summer. No, I won't be telling you about how great "Boyhood" was because more than enough people have written about Linklater's masterpiece.
In fact, you might have missed the exhilarating work Director Doug Liman and his star Tom Cruise gave us this past summer. Chances are you probably did miss "Edge of Tomorrow" when it played in theatres this past June. The paltry 90 million dollars it made at the box office was also further proof that Tom Cruise just isn't the box office draw he used to be. The star has had a bad rep of late, but -safe for the Oprah couch jumping - we should really give the guy a break. He’s still the talented actor that acted in “Magnolia”, “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Minority Report” just to name a few of his achievements. His work in Liman's movie is solid and reminds me why he became a movie star in the first place.
Then why did nobody catch on to the brilliance? It just came out that Warner Bros. moved their upcoming Wachowski Brothers movie "Jupiter Ascending" to 2015 because of how badly "Edge of Tomorrow" performed at the box office for them. Yikes. The reviews for "Edge of Tomorrow" were positive, earning a 90% fresh rating on Rottentomatoes, and the feedback I got from people who saw it was that it was the best Tom Cruise movie they saw in a very long time.
You might have dismissed the film as a sci-fi “Groundhog Day” and you wouldn’t have been wrong. However, Liman's film was more than just a gimmick; it had an originality and spontaneity that most other blockbusters failed to carry this summer. A playfulness that left you giddy with excitement. It also had a great, strong female lead performance in Emily Blunt’s war -torn hero. Is it just me or is Blunt one of the most underrated actresses around today? In everything she’s in, I always end up loving what she does with the role.
For a film that essentially dealt with Cruise's Colonel Cage time-looping the same situation over and over again, you might have expected the film to start getting a feeling of repetitiveness, but that never happened. In fact, the only quibble I had with the movie was the last 10 or so minutes when the plot deviated away from the time-looping and into anti-climactic combat mode. That was a small price to pay for what had followed before it, “Edge of Tomorrow” was one of the most thrilling cinematic experiences I had in a while and, surprisingly, also one of the funniest. The film’s humor was a definite plus as we were given the same situation over and over again, mocking itself with ingeniously constructed humor.
I could have written about "Lucy" and what an unusual, underrated treat it was but Sasha already did that beautifully with her review, I could have pondered the brilliant layers and colors of "Snowpiercer's" episodic, dystopian narrative but Ryan already chimed in about how incredible that movie was. So here I am, giving props to another 2014 movie that went under the radar. "Edge of Tomorrow" is a movie that should not have worked but it did, it kept me on the edge of my seat and was actually something to recommend at the multiplex this summer.