Pretty damn good.

Rating: Null/10 (8 September 2015)

I am no fan of Tom Cruise, especially when cast as a hero. He strikes me as a second hand car salesman; too slick to be true. I had therefore no problem to picture him as the protagonist in this movie: an officer charged with speaking to the media: lacking any combat-experience and intent on staying as far away from any combat zone as possible. When ordered to join the troops in what his superior deems to be a walk-in-the-park landing, Tom blackmails his commander to let him off the hook, which severely backfires on him, for he finds himself soon stripped of rank among the first to land with the reputation of being a deserter who pretended to be an officer to escape his duty.
The enemy are called mimics for reasons that are never explained in the movie. They resemble metal octopuses, who move at incredible speed, mostly underground. They are aliens and that is about all we learn about them and that is all we need to learn about them. It suffices that they are a deadly force hell-bent on wiping out humanity(some decades in the future, somebody will write a book about how these inhuman threats are a sign of the times, just like 70s and 80s had their disaster movies).
D-day quickly turns into a massacre as the aliens wipe out the human forces before they can gain a foothold. Tom dies too, but before he does, he manages to kill one of the rarest of mimics, and finds himself returned to life one day before the landing takes place. Baffled Tom goes through the same day and tries to intervene the course of action in a haphazard way. It doesn't matter that he does because everyone dies.. and he does to. And then finds himself alive and back in time again.
And so it goes. With each cycle Tom gets better because he knows what will happen, but also has a lot of time to gain experience, but dies nevertheless again and again. How does he get out of this predicament? He learns with each cycle and eventually he is aided by Emily Blunt, who has suffered from the same effects.
Up till this sounds like a corny predictable movie, but the script isn't as easy as you might think. The focus in this movie isn't on the humans vs aliens conflict, but on the interaction between Cruise and Blunt and their frantic efforts to turn the only advantage they have, foreknowledge, against the aliens. The key to their success is actually their ability to convince others that Tom possesses that foreknowledge so that they help in the effort. And this is the hardest part.
The script avoids giving us insight into the alien thinking. The mimics are kept as far away from the camera as possible and we never get a good clear view of them. This is smart for any alien eventually gets boring when shown too often. An example is the landing, in which a lot of carnage happens before the aliens themselves actually show up.
The movie even throws us of the track by introducing a twist in the story that makes the aliens even more sinister. Perhaps everything has been planned beforehand?
Yet there are flaws in the movie, such as the way Tom ends up in the combat zone. And also the ending is a bit contrived and clearly written to give us a good feel. There is nothing against a movie with a good ending, but one that forced makes for a lesser ending. Also one wonders why, having the possession of a flying craft at the start of the invasion, Tom and Blunt feel the need to have to get a car and a helicopter further land inward thus getting themselves killed time and again?
Personally I think that the movie is at its best when Cruise and Blunt are together and it might have been more stronger if more time was to the group of people who aid him so that their characters would have mattered if and when they died.
My learning points about this movie would be that some more time could have spent characterizing the people who eventually will aid Tom. Spend less time on the battles in the landing zone and the repeating scenes(which in themselves are shot in a way as to avoid boring repetition, which ought to be mentioned) and give more time to the final attack.
My ranking gives this a 7 out of 10. This needs an explanation: in it's genre this movie is a 9.. but since ranks are given not to genre or category they are given an overall score. In it's genre of action sci-fi it deserves something of a 9. Which means it is pretty damm good.