Tom Cruise lives life on repeat in his new sci-fi film, and the result is a better exploration of video game logic than any actual video game adaptations.
Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow.
Warner Bros.
Video games keep looking more and more impressively like the movies, but actual movies about video games remain a pretty grim scene overall. We're past the Double Dragon days, but 2005's Doom, 2008's Max Payne, 2009's Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, and the efforts of Uwe Boll have kept big-screen adaptations disreputable, even while Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil series has continued to chug along as a reliable moneymaker.
We're at the point where if you weren't already familiar with the Need for Speed video game series, you'd never know that's what the Aaron Paul racing movie from earlier this year was based on from its marketing materials. Someone at the studio level clearly decided that the trailer wouldn't benefit from touting the film's "based on the best-selling video games" status.
Edge of Tomorrow, starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt and opening this Friday, isn't based on a video game, despite posters that make it look like it could have spawned from the latest hit first-person shooter game. But it does something that's a lot more interesting than transporting game characters over into a movie — it embraces video game logic and gives it a human face and heart, investing it with the numbness and exhaustion that come from running through the same scenario toward the same goal again and again until you get it right.
Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow.
David James/Warner Bros.
Edge of Tomorrow is actually based on a Japanese novel called All You Need Is Kill (a phrase that isn't quite English, but is certainly more memorable than the aggressively forgettable title they ended up using). The movie, which was directed by Doug Liman (Jumper), follows Cage (Tom Cruise), a former ad exec turned military officer living in a world that been invaded by an alien race labeled "Mimics," a breed of fast-moving tentacly things that seem to guess what mankind's next move will be before it's made.
Cage is the smug face of the global recruitment effort, but after he enrages a general (Brendan Gleeson), he finds himself shanghaied into service as one of the soldiers preparing to invade alien-occupied France in humanity's big push to exterminate the enemy. New technology has made it so that this isn't a direct death sentence — the soldiers have been given weaponized exoskeleton suits that, according to Cage's own party line, require minimal training to turn recruits into warriors. But he doesn't even know how to turn the safety off when he's dumped onto the beach and into combat.
The Mimics know the human forces are coming and quickly decimate the troops in a chaotic, brutal sequence that feels like a reworking of the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan, only with extraterrestrials. Cage has a momentary encounter with Rita (Emily Blunt), the "angel of Verdun" who became the mascot of the military effort after helping win the last battle — but she's killed, then he is too, bathed in the blood of the Mimic he dies taking out. Then, he wakes up to find out it's the day before, and he's just discovering his new role as a private again.
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