Has anyone else noticed that Tom Cruise is plagued . . .

Rating: 7/10 (7 June 2014)

. . . by machines rising out of the ground to attack him? Perhaps it began most famously with TOP GUN in 1986, when his "Maverick" character was just moseying along in a jet, only to be assaulted by surface-to-air missiles. Then in 2002's MINORITY REPORT, Cruise's "Chief John Anderton" incarnation was pursued by spidery metal eyeballs scurrying across floors to spy on him. Most people thought the culmination of robotic attacks from beneath upon Mr. Cruise would be WAR OF THE WORLDS in 2005, when massive machine-bound aliens awoke from millenniums of sleep underground just because Tom's "Ray Ferrier" was walking over their "graves." No such luck. Where Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s "Rod Tidwell" character loudly demanded that Cruise's 1996 JERRY MAGUIRE title sports agent "Show me the money!," Tom must yell at his own agent to "Show me the sneaky robots!" If you cross MINORITY REPORT spiders with the WAR OF THE WORLD robot suits, you get the "meteorite attackers" for EDGE OF TOMORROW. Though simple calculations prove that the mass of all the spider-bots shown in EDGE OF TOMORROW would have required a space object twice the size of Manhattan to contain them all (which would have been detected by astronomers years from earth, and blown to smithereens by our nuclear shield), who expects realism from Tom Cruise flicks?