Blockbuster of the year

Rating: 8/10 (6 June 2014)

This military science fiction shooter draws key audio-visual motifs from a battery of established grand-daddies in a variety of genres: fantasy (LOTR), military (Saving Private Ryan's shock-and-awe beach bombing and Full Metal Jacket's bunker vernacular and the self-aware-hat-doffing All-Metal exoskeletons), body-moulded extended prosthetic body suit and tentacled mimic aliens (obviously Michael Bay's Transformers) and time- travel fatigue (Groundhog Day and more recently, Source Code) and the resultant mash-up still manages to surprise and entertain for its runtime because of immaculate casting and pincer-sharp focus of slickly shot screenplay.
The trajectory of the main protagonist, a clumsy, blood-fearing military man who's propelled slowly into purposeful action hero really makes the viewer invested in the film at a deeper level. Tom Cruise does not get a note wrong and imbibes even the more difficult fringes of this new action-hero-persona like humour, irony, understated romance and most importantly the fatigue from the incessant time travel completely and makes Cage stand out. The film's other joy is that being designed in the post-feminist set-up, the other gender gets as much ballast as the hero. The heroine (Emily Blunt, fierce!) has gone through everything our hero is going through in front of us. She has entered into a realm of legend and with this bumbling potentially-macho disoriented male entering the scene, it's up to her to train him to a level of ability that makes him safe to be towed along in the final reckoning.
There are close to 200 back-and-forth trips, and with three of them patiently ran-through in the terrific opening, the screenplay milks the rest for fatigue-filled allusions, for slapstick and humour from knowledge and for gravitas and pathos of prescience and pre-sentiment with immaculate ease.
For the final act, we are given rest from the incessant creases of time- travel and launch into a linear blast-it-all resolution. My one gripe is that this supremely well-executed film could have had more transparent politics. It uses the military, engages with the aliens in militaristic fashion, name-drops countries like Britain, France, Russia and China, places the mega-ton rotating Sauron's eye-like "Omega" mother time- setter under the Louvre, mentions THE resistance-free march of Russians and Chinese across the European sub-continent aided by UK and yet, no parallel between this created and the real geo-political universe could be convincingly drawn.
While appreciating and delving into the masterpieces at the Louvre is a sort of time-travel for all viewers, but aliens making it their hub and producing planet-decimating, time-manipulating mimics from beneath this supremely visible man-made landmark seems to be an uncertain choice with unnecessary temporal detail. Also, the ultimate resolution rather than grounded in pure science fiction, like Source Code, is more at home in hokey fantasy that relegated the whole product into fantasy-nerd gamer- boy territory. Which is a pity, because Liman with his team do hold your attention better than any other blockbuster this year. Well worth a watch!