New Concept: Tom Cruise as the Anti-Hero

Rating: 10/10 (1 February 2015)

In the first five minutes of this film, I had to be thinking, "What a jerk!". This is an alien concept for Cruise, who is always the "Competent Man".
For the next couple of hours, we see a believable transformation of the jerk into a hero- And nobody will ever know it.
Tom Cruise is "Major Cage" - A Hypocrite, and a coward. Who is apparently getting his just deserts: arrested, demoted, and sent into the front line ranks of doomed soldiers using the very same equipment which he had told all of BBC was "Winning the War", only he has never used it, does not even know how to turn off the "Safety", and to top it off, it's not as much of a boon as he had insisted on British TV.
More quietly, we see references to a "Full Metal B____" aka Emily Blunt as "Rita", who had single handedly won a previous major engagement with "Minimal Training" plus a huge Sword.
We really don't understand what is happening until Cruise and "Company J" (Equipped with Drill Instructor Master Sergeant Farell played by Bill "Game Over" Paxton) hit Normandy Beach- And then we get to see what these "Mimics" really are.
But that is not the real fun, as Cruise, who is now "Private" Cage, takes out an unusual Mimic and himself in the process, only to wake up... On the previous day.
There have been a lot of films dealing with aspects of Time lately: "Predestination" of course, based on Robert A Heinlein's excellent short story "All you Zombies" which deals with the famous "Grandfather Paradox"- "What if one were to go back in time and kill their own grandfather?". Then, there is Relativistic Time-compression and expansion with 5th Dimensional cross time communication in Chris Nolan's "Interstellar", which could be seen as a rehash of "Contact" or an Homage to "2001: A Space Odyssey".
But this is a science fiction/War Movie version of "Groundhog Day", Doug Liman creates a somewhat believable excuse as to why it is happening.
With each iteration Cruise experiences, he changes from Arse to Hero- He has no choice really. If it had not have happened to him? He'd continue to be the jerk he was, most likely. But with each repetition that original jerky character falls by the wayside.
In short order, Cage discovers that he has something in common with Ms Blunt's "Rita", when she tells him something odd on the battlefield: "Find me when you wake up".
What does she mean?