His Cage only starts to become competent, and redeemable, thanks to rigorous instruction from Blunt's Vrataski, the film's real warrior icon. Director Doug Liman ( The Bourne Identity, Mr and Mrs Smith) is astute at judging when the conceit is wearing thin, and when to open up surprising new pockets of action in the timeline.Įdge of Tomorrow is also different in casting Cruise not as his usual hyper-athletic grinner, but as a hapless and initially unlikable dork. James Herbert's editing throws us in and out of the action, forever bringing us back to zero with a jerk – but with rhythmic variations, so that we don't hit the same points of the loop every time. Edge of Tomorrow refreshes that familiar notion and takes it a little further, a little more consistently, and a lot more self-consciously than most films. It's a good 20 years since people noticed that Hollywood action movies were following the lead of Nintendo in both look and structure. Fail better." More mundanely, it's just like a video game. The trick each time is to get further in the battle before returning to your starting point. He keeps getting killed over again, but learns some survival tricks along the way, thanks to super-soldier Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), the poster girl for the war effort. The twist: Cage is killed in battle but, because of a mysterious time loop, finds himself repeatedly sent back to the field to relive the same moments. The initial combat scenes, with hardware crashing from the skies and Cage palpably terrified, are intense, chaotic stuff: here's a rare sci-fi battle epic that tells you from the off that war isn't actually much fun. American officer William Cage (Tom Cruise) finds himself reduced to the ranks and dispatched to the front line he's actually an adman in charge of military PR, so when he's sent into battle under Bill Paxton's beaming headbanger sergeant, he's hopelessly out of his depth. So: in the near future, Earth faces an extraterrestrial invasion force of wildly flailing metallic octopus things. The film is reliant on well-placed surprises, so here I'll plant a neon-lit SPOILER ALERT! and let you take your chances. A man stuck in a time loop, fated to relive the same action endlessly? Seen it – in Groundhog Day. Humans going to war in robotic exoskeletons? Seen it – as long ago as Aliens and countless times since. At first sight, Edge of Tomorrow is only too routine. The new Tom Cruise showcase, Edge of Tomorrow, represents an ingenious admission that, while there's nothing new under the sun of genre cinema, recycling can still be creative and that, if you're going to do it, you might as well do it blatantly. Well, here's an interesting something else. You find yourself getting weary and jaded, and asking – as showbiz agents do with a yawn in the old movies – so, what else ya got? So the new Spider-Man series looks like the old Spider-Man series the new Godzilla reboot is better than the old Godzilla reboot, but came too soon after Pacific Rim, which was just Godzilla with robots. Anyone who watches a lot of blockbuster cinema soon hardens to the familiarity of most product, to the relentless recycling of the same handful of once-decent ideas.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |