Fine, fun movie, but with a bad, "focus group" ending that almost ruins it.

Rating: 8/10 (12 July 2014)

So, Tom Cruise seems to have a thing for scifi movies these days and, I have to say, for the most part they are pretty good.
Edge of Tomorrow (EoT), is another such film. Plenty of action and time travel malarkey and an alien invasion smack in the middle of it. Cruise does action rather well and there is plenty of opportunity here, I'm sure, for him to do a lot of his own stunts.
But what do you get for your money? Well, imagine D-Day meets Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day and you'll have a good idea of what to expect. Cruise is the soldier seemingly cursed to repeat the same day over and over. The difference here is that the day resets when he dies, not when he goes to sleep. And he dies a lot, of course. In the process, learning everything about his fellow soldiers and the aliens and how, in fact, to not get killed.
The action set-pieces are well done and there is some originality in them. But essentially, it is one action scene after another, as Cruise tries to find a way to turn the tide of the war against the aliens.
The aliens, as others have observed, bear similarities with the sentinels from the Matrix. However, any indignation at this pseudo-plagiarism quickly vanishes as the action mounts.
Turns out, the aliens can control time, or rather, their leader can. But, in a twist purely designed to set up the premise of the whole movie, that power can be stolen from them by simply killing an "alpha", which are aliens connected to the main controlling brain of the invasion. Yeah, I know, it's hokey and it doesn't make sense whatsoever.
So, derivative story, derivative aliens and an alien weakness designed by whoever came up with the aliens in After Earth. So it must be rubbish, right? Actually no. EoT is a fine, fun military scifi adventure that holds together despite its flaws. However, all the fun, action and enjoyment comes perilously close to being ruined by the dumb ending.
See, time travel has a set of rules. Anyone that has watched any amount of scifi knows them well. If you go back in time, you can change the future. This is what Cruise's character Cage is trying to do. Going back to the beginning of the same day in order to find a way to defeat the aliens instead of them defeating us.
But, at the end of the movie, Cage gets to go back once more, after defeating the alien menace. Except, that when he wakes up at that first day, the aliens are still defeated. Wait, that bit hasn't happened yet... so what the movie is trying to sell us is that by changing the future you can change the past...
I'm sorry, but that is just bullshit right there and I can tell you exactly how it came about.
Presumably the ending was deemed to dark if both Tom and his lady-friend soldier get killed at the end. So some morons in a focus group somewhere suggested to the studio that they make the ending happier and more heroic (as if self-sacrifice isn't the noblest thing in the world). So a new ending was shot in which everything turned out fine in the end.
Let me make it clear, I don't dislike the ending because it is happy. I dislike it because it is crappy! Whilst this ending will never come close to being disappointing in the way that say... Blake's 7, or Mass Effect 3, was, it nonetheless made me scowl and glare at the screen.
After adhering to its own rules for the whole film, the ending gleefully throws them away so that idiots with no brain stem can walk out of the movie with a stupid smile on their faces. Unfortunately, those who do possess a nervous system are left feeling cheated and saddened by this sudden, but by no means inevitable, betrayal.
Now, I said the ending almost ruins it and it does. Only the general level of fun and mayhem up to that point saves it. That, and my fervent hope that, much like I Am Legend (which suffered a similar ending for stupid people), there will be an alternative ending cut made available on Bluray/DVD. Perhaps something darker and more noble, or perhaps something that has just been thought out more and not hacked on at the behest of a test audience of popcorn munching primates. That is my hope for this movie.
PLOTHOLE EDIT: So, the alien brain has the power to reset time IF one of the alpha's is killed. So why then, does it not keep an alpha close to hand and have the minor aliens kill it if it is threatened by assassin's such as Tombo and Blondie? Instant reset and then it sets an ambush for them. Without the blood in their veins, they won't remember they've been there before and would repeat everything, allowing brain to kill them handily.
SUMMARY: Good scifi action movie made a little sour by the dumb ending, but worth watching nonetheless. Hopefully there'll be an alternate ending on Bluray.