We fight today for a better tomorrow, but what if tomorrow never comes? “Edge of Tomorrow” is a first-rate sci-fi action movie, and it is a first-rate antiwar movie. I have never seen such realistic action in the theater before, and in 3D it felt I was inside a real war. “Edge of Tomorrow” has got some of the best war sequence since “Saving Private Ryan,” plus, it is funny, laugh-out-loud funny. The film is loosely based on the Japanese novel “All You Need is Kill” by Hiroshi Sakurazaka which no doubt was inspired by “Groundhog Day”- the classic comedy where Bill Murray keeps experiencing the exact same day over and over. This time around, however, it is more like living inside a video game, you play, you die, then you reset and play again from the start, repeatedly, till you kill “the boss” and complete the stage. The only problem is, unlike video games, the pain is real, the war is real and the memory is real. The soundtrack is not heroic at all, it is more like horror-music, making it absolutely clear that war is scary.
It is the war of the worlds. The humans are at war with extraterrestrials called “Mimics.” They seem to be mimicking the worst form of human intelligence- intelligence without any sensitivity to the pain of others. It is never made clear what the aliens want or why we are fighting them in the first place. As if it does not matter, we just have to assume humans must battle aliens. Gone are the days when humans wanted to communicate with extraterrestrials to learn about them. Hatred always begins with ignorance and usually ends in violence, it is the twilight on murky water. The root of violence is self-deception, the assaulter’s ability to convince itself that it is the victim.
In “Edge of Tomorrow” Tom Cruise plays a morally challenged army officer, Major William Cage, who gets trapped in the worst day of his life, reliving it over and over again, like some kind of divine punishment. And every day he is woken up by the same words: “On your feet maggot!” Previously an advertising man, he excels in selling “happiness.” The problem is it is not “war and happiness,” it is “war and peace,” and there is a major difference between happiness and peace. Cage is the Public Relations Officer of the world’s army, known as UDF (United Defense Force) - he is their media guy. His job is to sell the war, and to increase recruitment of new soldiers.
Cage is UDF’s prime salesman and yet he has no idea how to operate their prime product: the weapon-jacket. He is a fraud. So when he is asked to take part in real combat he does the most logical thing- he runs. In comes Master Sergeant Farell (played hilariously by Bill Paxton) who is asked to make sure Major Cage, now demoted to Private Cage, does not and cannot run. Now he has to go to battle wearing that jacket of death.
Cage along with other newly recruited reject soldiers is put in a team called the J-Squad (perhaps a reference to the notorious JSOC exposed by Jeremy Scahill’s “Dirty Wars”) and sent to die a foolish death on D-Day mission which in military terminology means first day of combat attack. It is here that Cage accidentally comes in contact with Alpha, a Mimic knight, and acquires the aliens’ time-resetting power. It is like burning in hell-fire, he has to taste death every day and be resurrected every day.
This war is very different from the last great war- World War II. All the men of “Edge of Tomorrow” are hypocrites and above all they are cowards. The only “real man,” the only true soldier, is a woman who single handedly killed hundreds of Mimics. The men nicknamed her Full Metal Bitch. Sergeant Rita Vrataski (played with dignity by Emily Blunt) is the most famous soldier in the world, ever since UDF put her face on the “I Want You” recruitment posters. Like Cage she once had the ability to reset time but lost it unexpectedly. Now she is disillusioned about the war and is slowly losing all hope. Then she learns about Cage. Rita decides to mentor him, and make him a real warrior. Rita becomes his inspiration to become a better man. Every time Cage meets her he is awestruck and stares at her, to which she always responds, “Do I have something on my face?”
As Cage keeps learning and keeps getting better at killing Mimics, he hits a dead end- no matter how hard he tries Rita always dies after a certain point. Cage needs a new strategy to save Rita and to destroy the Mimics. The key to finding the film’s ambiguous ending lies in two questions: First - at the hospital, right after his car accident, he tells Rita he can no longer reset time- does Cage lie to her? Second - at the climax, when he takes the J-Squad to confront the Mimics- is that happening for the first time or is it a reset too?
It is not the clever plot that makes the film interesting, quite frankly, I found the whole exposition of the time-control mechanism rather silly. Primarily director Doug Liman wanted to make a satire on the meaninglessness of war and also on Hollywood’s bread and butter, the sci-fi genre itself. But “Edge of Tomorrow” is not cynical, on the contrary, it is quite optimistic. It is a film about hope.
At the end Cage is completely transformed, his empty confidence is now real competence, his “brand image” is now a useful product. The film ends with a song of forgiveness, John Newman’s “Love Me Again,” Cage’s final step for redemption.
