Critics reviews

Edge of Tomorrow vanished from theaters about as quickly and unceremoniously as it arrived, and it wasn't until its home video debut last month that I had the chance to have a look. I'm very glad I did. This is a sprightly, buoyant blockbuster, deftly realized and frightfully clever.

Liman isn't simply rejecting such modes of filmmaking, but he's disinterested in detail-oriented world-building, where formative, driving character motivations are an end in themselves. He uses the film's premise against itself, wearing down any sense of expository propulsion by whittling Cage's plight to an affective, existential joie de vivre, where the prospect of death is, paradoxically, the prospect of life.

Never before in any film had I experienced a real fear of death as I did in "Edge of Tomorrow." Just when the film had coerced you into a familiar rhythm, you are ripped away from it, and thrust, like Cage himself, into an unknown experience — something nearly unheard of at the multiplex these days.

The big battle sequences and aliens lead to a climax oddly/exactly like Pacific Rim‘s, a descent into amniotic-ish fluid to detonate a bomb killing the monster that controls all the others. Up to that forgivably underwhelming finale, Edge neatly synthesizes Cruise's ongoing fears of obsolescence and the fiscal pragmatics of its location into a witty story about the sheer tedium of self-improvement as a necessity for survival.

...Cage is a complex and demanding role for any actor. It is especially right for Cruise, in that Cage starts out as a Jerry Maguire-type who'll say or do anything to preserve his comfort, then learns through hard (lethal) experience how to be a good soldier and a good man. He changes as the story tells and retells and retells itself. By the end he's nearly unrecognizable from the man we met in the opening.

Edge Of Tomorrow's main attraction is this near-seamless blend of star, structure, and setup. Its deft pacing, canny design, and sense of humor make it easy to overlook the fact that it mostly glosses over the implications of its time-loop premise. Consistency is a rare virtue for a big-budget tentpole movie; remarkably, the movie's ending (which diverges from [the] source novel, All You Need Is Kill) manages to preserve a sense of integrity while delivering the requisite audience satisfaction.

In "Edge of Tomorrow," Mr. Liman brings Mr. Cruise's smile out of semiretirement and also gives him the kind of physical challenges at which he so brilliantly excels. Mr. Cruise's great talent has always been body-based... Much like old-school, pre-Method movie stars, he takes possession of his characters from the outside in, expressing their qualities and kinks through his extraordinarily controlled physicality.

The metaphorical overlay of fantasy and history is the best thing "Edge of Tomorrow" has to offer—and, for much of its running time, that overlay is enough to lend the movie a shiver of curious power... "Edge of Tomorrow" conveys its ingenious, historically resonant premise but never develops it. The narrative is high-concept gimmickry realized with efficiency and energy but not much imagination.

Your reaction to "Edge of Tomorrow" is all about whether you can surrender to its hyper-macho action-movie fugue state and find benumbed pleasure therein. The fact that this movie is about a guy with PTSD and is also a movie that deliberately induces PTSD in the viewer may establish that Liman and his writers are more intelligent and self-aware than, say, Michael Bay, who never requires elaborate narrative excuses to make his spectacles more and bigger.

Had they cast any other action-movie stud in the lead role, the movie would've remained a clever, knowing nod toward the Sisyphean self-image held by most FPS gamers (who would probably just as soon fire up their own Xbox 360s than watch Cage fail over and over and over). But Cruise's participation transmutes, as it always does, everything around him, turning the movie's series of false starts, dead ends, and hard lessons into a working metaphor for his own career.

Having worked through its central concept to the point where it can rightfully get frisky, it hints towards an interlocked tragedy of earth-shattering (ie, humane) proportions. But, another, more stock tragedy surfaces, and the long, straight path to mediocrity is taken with bothersome gusto. It is the film's ultimate curse: genre.