![]() (READ: Richard Schickel on Saving Private Ryan)įor most of the film’s two hours, Liman keeps the plot plates spinning with the suave dexterity he showed in Swingers, Go, The Bourne Identity and Mr. As the periods of their endlessly repeated first meeting lengthen, they escape the beach for a deserted farmhouse then the Thames River, infested with swimming Mimics and finally Paris in search of the Omega Mimic that directs all the others. Rita used to be “in the loop” with the Mimics, but not now: “I had it and I lost it.” But when she realizes that Cage has somehow got on the enemy’s wavelength - a fact she must face anew each time she sees him, since he’s come back from the future - she trains him at Heathrow and fights bravely with him. Yet on Spielberg’s Omaha Beach, there was no fabulous babe, no female Audie Murphy for an out-of-place, out-of-time soldier to bond with. This is the Saving Private Ryan beach invasion, played a second time as tragic farce. In one weirdly funny image, a cargo plane drops to the earth, smashing one soldier. Still, wouldn’t his fellow soldiers wonder why a guy approaching middle age has the army’s lowest rank? Answer: No, because it’s a movie!) With precious little training in weapons operation and maneuvering his bulky robot uniform, Cage lands on the beach and sees his squad promptly wiped out. (Cruise looks great at 51 - he could be a fit 40. And now he’s a private with a coward’s rep, to be bullied by his master sergeant (Bill Paxton) and his gruff new mates. (READ: Tom Cruise fights Tom Cruise in Oblivion)īrigham stockades the reluctant warrior and attaches him to a squad of soldiers due to be dropped on the beach tomorrow. Not so much as a paper cut.” Unlike the gung-ho Maverick in Top Gun, which launched Cruise to stardom 28 years ago, Cage is spoiling not to fight. “I do this to avoid doing that,” he tells the hardass General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson). A former ad agency spin doctor, Cage joined the service to create promos that would entice civilians into deadly combat. As Major William Cage in Edge of Tomorrow, he is, at first, the anti-Tom. In last year’s Oblivion, he was a career soldier battling his own clone. In Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds remake, Cruise was an ordinary dad trying to outrun an alien takeover. (It sounds exactly as cool in the original Japanese: O ru Yu N i do Izu Kiru.) Or they could have kept the title of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s 2004 source novel: All You Need Is Kill. Director Doug Liman and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth could have borrowed a name from any number of James Bond films - You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die, Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day - to describe its hero’s curse and gift. ![]() The movie’s only static element is its title, which oddly suggests a mashup of TV soap operas. ![]() Tom Cruise is the Groundhog Day grunt, and Emily Blunt the Angel Bitch, in Edge of Tomorrow, a furiously time-looping joy ride and the smartest action film of the early summer season.
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