Edge of tomorrow:a fun if hollow film

Rating: 8/10 (22 August 2014)

It's always fun to watch a time-travelling and see what it does with the genre. I wrote my senior thesis on time-travelling, so when I heard about this film, needless to say, I was interested.
Tom Cruise plays Major William Cage, a spineless public affairs officer, who's forced to go out on the front lines to fight an invasion against aliens who have taken over large parts of the continent of Europe. The invasion goes horribly wrong with the soldiers getting slaughtered and Cage is killed, but not before killing one of the larger aliens and getting its blood all over him. He wakes up and soon realises that every time he dies, his life "resets" to the point when he first arrives at the military base at Heathrow airport before the invasion. Cage meets up with Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) who is an expert soldier who tells Cage that she had the same ability to "reset" before a blood transfusion had taken away that power. With the help of a rag-tag group of soldiers, Rita teams up with Cage to train him in the ways of being a warrior and discover how to stop the alien threat once and for all.
What the many trailers and TV spots of the film do not showcase is how funny this movie is. After establishing the threat of the alien force and Cage's power, the story almost becomes a Warner Bros. cartoon with all of the comedic ways Cage manages to die. It's cathardic to see Cruise's character who had been portrayed as weak-willed get his comeuppance learning from his mistakes.
The narrative focuses on the enjoyment of the structure of the story itself, and the interplay with the audience: expectations of time-travelling, the mystery of the ability, and also the question of how much Cruise's character has gone through this process to where we see the movie more from the eyes of the characters surrounding him as he's become so knowledgeable about the world and the people around him that he almost becomes "other-worldly" even from Rita, who herself had gone through the same thing.
What you will not find, however, are a cast of well-developed interesting characters. You get stock military types where they ramble soldier jargon, pound their chests in testosterone fury, and safely stay within the confines being supportive canon fodder with only one or two distinguishing characteristics about them. Despite his high listing on the cast list, Bill Paxton's character of Master Sergeant Farell's only interesting features are the speeches he frequently makes, his southern accent, and the fact he has a moustache; he's essentially just used as a talking checkpoint for the audience to reorient themselves when they travel back to specific moments whenever Cage goes back in time. Even Cage and Rita don't have much concerning layered personalities, with their only real centre of character development springing from the conceit of the time-travelling mechanic in the film and how it effects them as people.
Though there isn't much of a story to be found here, "Edge of Tomorrow" is a well-put together action film with thrilling action sequences, good pacing, and a deft understanding of how time-travelling works best in this type of film, even if the mechanic itself is not that expertly examined in the story. You could do worse in terms of spending 113 minutes on a film, and Edge of Tomorrow provides enough excitement the entire time to where one's never bored of the narrative and the structure of the film is constantly bringing up engaging action-packed scenarios.