Left desiring a lot more with a film budget like this, more about Cage than aliens

Rating: 4/10 (24 June 2014)

I had hopes for "Edge of Tomorrow," because Tom Cruise was rumored to have actually done a decent job for the film. The plot started out even enough, and of course got interesting when the main battle sequence got started. Then it all fell apart, and the entire film amounted to a repeat of the last 10 minutes of the first 20 minutes of the film for the entire 113 minute running time.
The alien storyline was great, different, and had legs before you knew their weaknesses. But those legs were cut off in the mundane replay of watching the leads' hunt down the real reason behind their adversary's success which had little to do with the aliens themselves and more to do with watching Tom Cruises race through the same old paces. This, in the totality of the film, completely stopped the involvement of the actual aliens in the storyline action; and shifted the entire storyline to watching Tom Cruise repeat himself. Over. Over. Over and Over again.
On Tom Cruise's character, viewers got a little background, as the apt "Groundhog Day" story style comparison truncated this development because the time-line jumped back so many times, that viewers had an opportunity to cease caring about the character. Tom Cruise did a great job on not being Tom Cruise. Sadly though, the script left him with little to work with. Now had the story kept pace - without the always questionable suggestion that time could be meddled with, merely by a single alien intelligence â€“ we would have gone on to find a serious story about alien technology or some other interesting creation. Alas not though.
The one world paradigm of the film's society glimpse was dull too, and didn't do much to convey the story; the film didn't have the community ownership as in the way "Twenty-eight Days Later" offered British connection to the Island, and its landmarks. In fact it was a distraction as you never knew anything about the type of society Tom Cruise's character was coming from, except to know it was in the future and that the Eiffel Tower & I.M. Pei's Pyramid lasted long enough in history to be destroyed in the film (though the prize of the film was not located in the same place as the Holy Grail is in "Da Vinci Code"). Aliens, yes. Relatable humans, no. The military themselves seemed pretty much a transfer of the crew from Sigourney Weaver's "Alien", right down to the stereotypical 'Latina' character, and of course the obligatory half-naked-eight-packed "sexy white guy" in the thread of Casper Van Dien's "Starship troopers."
The success of the story is that you are never given a chance to know anything more about the alien intelligence, except that they really don't like humans. Much in the same way of "War of the Worlds." We get the "all powerful alien, with glaring weaknesses" fit into a 113 minute time-line; but this is to a viewer-ship that never gets a detailed film/story about aliens, like we get a detailed "Mission Impossible" story of conspiracy in other Cruise films - we are left to wonder whether a good alien take-over film can be done in 113 minutes. There also seemed to be some "Scientology" rhetoric thrown into the story line for good measure as well, especially in the tone of "past-lives".
At any rate, the film was great going in, but petered out twenty minutes after the story rolled. I'll be blunt and say, Emily Blunt was awesome carrying the film, though I could have waited for the Red-Box debut!