Or are audiences too hooked on Hollywood movies that explain everything? A BuzzFeed Entertainment debate! (MAJOR SPOILERS ahead!)
Emily Blunt and Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow.
Warner Bros. Pictures
Adam B. Vary: It's no secret that we both enjoyed Edge of Tomorrow, Alison, but we've gathered here today to discuss a part of the movie that we disagree about: the film's ending. So, obviously, the rest of this conversation is going to be riddled with MAJOR SPOILERS about Edge of Tomorrow — and a few other major Hollywood films as well.
As you astutely observed in your review, Edge of Tomorrow uses video game logic — if I mess up and die, I just re-spawn at my save point and keep grinding ahead until I succeed — as a surprisingly witty engine for its storytelling, and a resonant metaphor for the exhaustion of war. That progress builds and builds as Tom Cruise's Cage and Emily Blunt's Rita get closer and closer to their goal of reaching the central "brain" of the alien Mimics that have conquered the entire European continent. Cage and Rita desperately need to kill that brain, because it allows the aliens to reset the day when they die and learn from their mistakes, a power Cage unwittingly hijacks in the opening 20 minutes of the film. Before they get to their goal, however, Cage loses that power, and when he and Rita finally make it to the alien brain buried within the Louvre, they both die in their successful attempt to destroy it. As Cage's life drifts from him, however, tendrils of alien brain goo enter his body, and ZAP, he's suddenly sent back to the very beginning of the film, before he was shanghaied into being a grunt in the war — and, more to the point, well before he and Rita actually ever meet.
I loved this ending, but before I staunchly defend it, I would love to hear more about your reaction to it.
David James / Warner Bros. Pictures
Alison Willmore: I didn't hate the ending, but it did seem pretty hand wave-y — "And now the story's finished, so... have something happy!" This being a big-budget Tom Cruise action movie, I didn't expect it to conclude with our heroes both getting killed, the world never to know the valiant efforts of the man and woman who died taking down the alien force that threatened to exterminate mankind. So it didn't come as a surprise to me that the film volleyed Cage back in time to the beginning, where he's also conveniently poised to look up Rita (who, thanks to the time-looping shenanigans, has no idea who he is).
My main complaint with what happens at the end is that it seemed like a convenient betrayal of the logic by which the rest of the movie operated — why, if Cage has been sent back in time using the power of alien goo, do the rest of the aliens stay blown up? If he's returned, much wiser, to the start of the film, before he, Rita, and J-Squad ever set out on the mission to the Louvre, then shouldn't the aliens also still have their firm stronghold on most of Europe? He'd have the knowledge to destroy them, sure — as an officer, he could probably even arrange to have a squad of soldiers sent there to do it for him, after coming up with the right cover story to avoid getting labeled mentally unwell and hospitalized. (For a military force desperately trying to save the world from malicious extraterrestrials and apparently happy to throw a dude with no training out into a major battle, the United Defense Force seems a little oversensitive about mental health judgments.)
Adam, did that not strike you as some shameless screenplay magic on the part of writers Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth? Or do you have another read on what happened?
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