Boddhisatva

Rating: Null/10 (22 January 2015)

This is that rare thing, a blockbuster that does more than just deafen with noise of its machinery. More on this in a bit. But I'm also amazed at how well it deploys that machinery, I want to quickly note this deployment that shows we are at the hands of excellent practitioners.
It's set in the near future, about warring alien invaders, but the template is from the past; a WWII movie about landing to France and the final battle that blows back towards freedom. A simple choice that made a difference in immersion from Star Trek stuff.
Setting it in the future allows for wider room in the story. They chose time travel, normally cumbersome when it mechanically props a story, but here fresh because it's about loosening up limits of it. This way we escape the war movie trapping where we know that the hero must dodge every bullet and survive to the end, here he dies again and again, some funny deaths in place of heroics; seriousness goes, expectation goes, it all becomes more fluid.
And Tom Cruise is marvelously cast, just brilliant use of him that helps so much usher us in. He's cleverly made to be at first the preening jerk that he grates everyone as, cowardly trying to avoid battle, instead of right off the bat the noble action hero he would normally portray. He's laughed off, fails, fate as cosmic joke, and in this way slowly emerges redeemed in the crucible of war so that when he becomes the hero it feels earned and right.
This is all near perfect engagement to my mind, devices but so very well employed. The first is the draw-in, the other two ways of throwing the crank we'd like to; Cruise not a hero, thwarted heroics. Okay, now forget about aliens, gadgets, a war to save Earth.
The movie is about redemption, but consider this with more depth. A man who would not assume his place in life, cast down there anyway but now stripped of his precious self, no longer above others. Interested viewers can observe the karmic underpinning of being reborn an endless number of lives, the successive round as Buddhist samsara, a cycle of reincarnation powered by delusion and ego. That aspect of Buddhism which observes how present and future life is dictated by past action is the easiest to illustrate, so we see it often; Groundhog Day is the most known.
The more he pushes against the narrative, the harder it becomes, but just going along with what happens doesn't help either. He gets killed every time. No he will have to improvise a new self in the flow of endless lives, this is sparked by a woman he meets and tells him to find her when he wakes up again. Now comes the great part.
Along the way there's another shift, even more powerful; this is during the drive to Lyons when we suddenly notice that he's been further down the story than we have, able to anticipate events because he has been down there before.
Something great happens. Suddenly it's a countless number of lives he has spent with her improvising a path. Now he knows her as deeply as we can imagine.
It all builds up to a last mission, one last chance to get it right except this time they can both die. The filmmaker delivers the expected climax, doing it well, but also delivers something else that is completely marvelous.
She kisses him as action heroes do sometimes. But she kisses him for the first time, having known him for only a day, trusting it is much more. He watches her go, possibly for the last time, having spent with her an eternity.
He comes back of course at the beginning of the very first day, now redeemed, except no one knows he did it. It's her image being celebrated on the wall.
He goes to see her one last time, a first time for her (she remembers nothing), but now he knows her as more than an image in a story (an image he made famous as part of the publicity narrative that inspires at the start of the film).
She greets him, now her superior, with the same defiant tone as ever. Will he stay or go? Is it a first day in this affair, a last day, is it even one? It's all in Cruise's baffled laugh, both the first day and last and having spent a lifetime together.
This is absolutely breathtaking stuff; but something you'll deepen with love as deep as you've known or can imagine, the pieces perfectly arranged for you to do so. My first thought was that there must be no better film about love last year, unless it's Malick.
Something to meditate upon.