video game movie

Rating: 5/10 (9 June 2014)

Bloodless violence and lack of character development. If you're going to make a war movie, even a Sci-Fi war movie, please watch Saving Private Ryan first.
Blood, tears, terrified faces, severed limbs, bodies blowing up--none of those are in the movie. Tom Cruise's character, Bill Cage, never shows the suffering of the Cassandra Complex: knowing people are going to die, but being absolutely unable to prevent it. Groundhog Day had tons more character development, and that was a comedy. We saw Bill Murray's character's rage and pain, repeating the same day over, and over, and over again.
All the background characters--the other soldiers, including Emily Blunt's Rita, are one-dimensional. They are all just Gung Ho. There is a black guy. There is a fat guy. There is a woman. Why? It doesn't matter. Their only function is to die, and give the illusion of diversity in casting.
The movie just goes and goes. We never get those scenes, like in The Matrix, where for 10 minutes between action sets we can dive into who the characters are. The dialogue, for everyone except Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, is just so on the nose.
Most critics praised this movie, so I expected to be blown away. Instead I got a video game. That is actually unfair to video games like Mass Effect and The Last Of Us. They have better written characters.