Live. Die. Repeat. Perfect!

Rating: 8/10 (9 June 2014)

What I found so enjoyable about Edge of Tomorrow is that very little time is wasted on explaining the concepts on which the movie is based. This allows it to be a smart, taut and riveting action movie, pared down to its bare essentials. The basic premise of the movie is this - what if you were given multiple chances to "re-set" your life. Would you learn from your experiences and improve the direction of your life, or would you just live it over and over? Make no mistake, the movie doesn't spend time pondering this question; it just jumps right into the middle of answering it, and does so with a minimum of fuss and backstory.
Tom Cruise plays William Cage, an ad executive who's working as the media relations officer in the war between invading aliens and us earthlings. Cruise is in superb physical form in the movie, endowed with unfairly high levels of energy and charisma. He is unwillingly thrust into the battlefield (for reasons I couldn't quite grasp) and is killed off by an Alpha alien within the first 20 minutes of the movie.
Due to some of the alien blood having entered his bloodstream, Cage is now able to repeat his life...starting from the point where he is kicked awake by his soon to be commanding officer. It is to the movie's credit that this does not become repetitive, especially as we see Cage resetting and repeating more than 10-12 times, each time getting closer to understanding how to get rid of the aliens.
In the course of the resetting, he meets Rita Vartakis, played by an unbelievably muscled Emily Blunt. Rita is the army's poster girl, killer of hundreds of aliens. Having gone through the same arduous resetting process as Cage, she becomes his ally in the fight against the invaders.
The training sequences and the resetting scenes are tightly edited and are probably the best parts of the movie. There isn't much chemistry between the lead actors, although this may have been intentional. Shoehorning a romance into this movie would have killed the flow.
Oddly enough, once the resetting scenes are done, and the actual task of finding and killing the aliens is taken up, the movie starts to flag. It's almost like the movie changes directors, since the tough parts are over! It moves from smart thriller with an innovative concept, to a generic action movie. But that's just the last few minutes.
Overall, the movie is great to watch, with fine performances from Cruise and Blunt. Bill Paxton also makes an appearance as a scenery-chewing commanding officer. The battle scenes and the final showdown are executed so well, you just might stop believing in the existence of CGI! And oh, for a change, it's not an American landmark that gets decimated in the movie :)