Groundhog Day With Aliens. I'm sold!

Rating: 8/10 (25 November 2018)

Edge of Tomorrow was a pleasant surprise for me going in. Of the big blockbuster movies coming out in the summer of 2014, Edge of Tomorrow was one of the ones I was looking forward to least, but I ended up really liking it. In fact, it is probably one of the better movies of the summer so far. They took an unoriginal premise and actually made it work. Tom Cruise does a great job. The action and effects were also very well-done.
The story revolves around a man named William Cage (Tom Cruise) who is a Major in the American army. However, he is mostly a public speaker and is not used to combat. He is suddenly forced into this huge battle with an alien race which up until now have been unmatched by any military in the world. This was supposed be the deciding battle for the humans but it goes horribly. However, when Cage kills an alpha alien and dies he gains their ability. Now whenever he dies he repeats the same day before the big battle over and over again until he is able to destroy the aliens' power source. To do this he must get the help of a soldier named Rita (Emily Blunt).
The film does many things amazingly. I like the way they handle rinse and repeat type of story. I have seen this many times so I was not expecting too much going in, but I thought it was handled well. I love how Cage is able to take everything he has experienced from his countless repeats and use it to his advantage, whether it comes to his combat skills, to him relating and reasoning with the rest of the cast. The film is also very funny in how Cage repeats everything. I love how he gets wasted countless times in battle or by Rita herself. I especially love the training sequence where he constantly gets seriously injured and Rita kills him and he has to start over. This film really does feel like a video game where when you die you start the mission again, except I am watching instead of playing.
Tom Cruise does a great job in this. His character is the driving factor in this film. If not for him I would not like this film nearly as much as I do. I like how he starts out as a wimp in the beginning (which I am not used to seeing) and steadily grows more and more badass as the film progressed. Cruise has done many Sci-Fi films in the last few years like Oblivion. I like Oblivion a bit more than this, but this is still well-done. I also love Bill Paxton in this. I like his character and his performance is great. I have not seen Paxton in a major film in years so it was great to see him back.
As I said before the action and special effects look nice. The design for the aliens is something I have not quite seen before. I also like their ability that they gave to Cage. I have seen better looking aliens but I think they look fine.
I do have a couple issues though. Other than Cruise and Paxton's characters I did not find the rest of the cast to be that memorable. Rita is okay and Emily Blunt does a good job performance-wise. However, despite having some cool moments, I was just was not that invested in her. When her and Cage are having their romantic and dramatic moments I did not care. The other important characters are the people in Paxton's platoon. I do not remember any of these people. At first I thought this was going to be like Aliens where you have a group of very like able and badass marines, but that is not the case. They are boring and ultimately pretty irrelevant.
Overall, Edge of Tomorrow is an entertaining Sci-Fi movie that takes a premise we have seen many times and puts a relatively new spin on it. I think you should definitely check it out. Unfortunately, like with Oblivion, it seems that the film is not doing very well in the US which is a shame.