Groundhog D-Day with BFGs

Rating: 8/10 (6 June 2014)

Edge of Tomorrow (PG-13, 1:53, Imax, 3-D) — SF, biggie, original
Officially sourced from the Hiroshi Sakurazaka novel All You Need Is Kill, this movie will never escape the comparison to Groundhog Day, where the protagonist (here Tom Cruise instead of Bill Murray) is required to live the same day over and over until he gets it right and can finally escape into the future. What, does that make it derivative? Yeah, sure, because it reworks a concept so overused that you can remember picky little details of its predecessor — like the snowball fight or the alarm-clock song — 21 years later. When's the last time you saw a hair's-breadth escape from a car crash, volley of gunfire, or exploding bomb and thot to yourself "Golly, THAT'S original!"
The comparison I encourage you to make is to Greg Bear's Nebula-winning short story "Hardfought".
Here the day being relived occurs not in placid Punxsatawney, PA, but rather on the beaches of Normandy. Not the Normandy of D-Day 1944 (tho the movie was released on its 70th anniversary, doubtless by pure coincidence) but rather one of the near future, when a meteor smashing into Hamburg, Germany (seen briefly in an opening montage of TV news clips), has emitted a ravening horde of kinetic alien sea anemones that rapidly overspread Europe like, um, a ravening horde of Nazis (maps included). Human resistance seems futile until the Battle of Verdun (no, not THAT one, THIS one), when a heroine emerges: Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), quickly dubbed "the Angel of Verdun", who seems to be everywhere on the battlefield, able to anticipate the enemy's every move and provide just the right counter to it. On TV news coverage, this is credited by US Army Major William Cage (Cruise), a former PR flack, to "new technology".
Of course, as is customary in war, the first casualty of battle is the truth. There was no new technology involved. Instead, as we soon learn, Vrataski's abilities were a fluke, the result of her having been initially killed at the Battle of Verdun by an alpha-type alien that got some of its blood on her. It turns out that alpha blood, now mixed with hers, enables her to restart the day whenever she dies. So that's what she does, hundreds of times, each time learning exactly what to do to avoid her previous death until she finally prevails.
But wait, there's more. There's a flaw in her plan of continual resurrection. Eventually she's just wounded instead of killed, she gets a blood transfusion, and that thins out her time-shifting abilities to the point where they no longer work. Now she's just an ordinary soldier (tho admittedly by far the most experienced one on the planet), when into her lap drops Cage, a former ROTC guy who isn't trained for warfare, isn't any good at it, and wants nothing whatever to do with it. That's why he too was killed (also by a splattery alpha, as it happens) 5 minutes into the invasion he was press-ganged into. Rita's job becomes to prepare him for combat, join him on the battlefield, and keep killing him until he gets it right.
Of course, each day that Cage comes back, he's initially confronted with non-coms who think he's just a shirker looking to desert as soon as possible, so he has to figure out a reliable way of outwitting them as quickly as possible so he can get busy with the real work. The movie gives us 1 or 2 quick tastes of what this must be like without beating it to death. The rest of the film is building up the choreography step by step, using trial and error, without ever having seen the full dance demoed.
Hanging like a sword of Damocles over the whole proceeding is the knowledge that the alien's central controlling omega organism — Cage and Rita's ultimate goal — is itself capable of fiddling with time.
After you walk out of the theater, you may find yourself asking questions like "Where was our air support?", "Why didn't we just nuke 'em with ICBMs?", or "Why was Paris awash in water?", but none of that occurs to you in the midst of the action, which is a mark of a movie that effectively causes you to suspend your disbelief.