Quite possibly the best Sci-fi film since Starship Troopers

Rating: 8/10 (6 June 2014)

Among the various (shallow) criticisms, witticisms, and remarks that can be found against modern mainstream American cinema, there seems to always be at least a bit of common ground: a lack of diversity among everything from plots to race to the general appeal of the films. That being said, myself being bitter with the way cinema has turned out today in spite of the countless technological innovations even within the past five years or so, I still have some hope for blemishes of brilliance, of which Edge of Tomorrow certainly wields.
There are many shallow, Twitter-esque ways to sum up Liman's film. Groundhog Day but with war. Something something something Starship Troopers. Some combination of the two. But these do not effectively do justice to what is, in fact, an exceptional movie, confident in its own quality while acknowledging its inferiority to previous films.
From the opening scene, there is an age-old Citizen Kane reference with the use of newsreels to accurately describe the events that will happen in the film. One could say that, from the get-go, Edge is a fully realized film capable of paying homage effectively without the need to overdo it; that is, nobody in the film complains about how the Mimics resemble the bugs from Starship Troopers, nor does anyone use one of those age-old Terminator quotes we all love to hate. No, Edge is something different; it is exceptional in its way to utilize the crisis from Groundhog Day, the incredible energy and tension from The Terminator, even the aforementioned newsreel footage derived from Citizen Kane. Edge has, in this way, done something special: it has, once again, transcended the summer blockbuster by the simple way that it knows what it is doing. It's not quite Repo Man self-conscious, though it is at the very least intelligent.
Another common complaint of this new cinema is a lack of thought- provoking in most modern films. Edge has a moderately difficult plot to understand, but nothing that can't be explained relatively easily after viewing. So does Edge suffer for this reason? I say that, since it already has established itself as having some form of intelligence, this is not important. Edge knows what it is doing, and it does it very well, largely due to the bravura performance of Cruise; watch out for the middle ten minutes or so, Cruise has never been better.