A well crafted imitation.

Rating: 8/10 (16 June 2017)

It's unfortunate that this didn't come out a year earlier than it did. Had it been released in 2013, what I felt to be a pretty weak movie year, rather than coming out in 2014, arguably the best movie year of the decade so far, its financial success might have been much higher. Not only that, it was released in June, a major movie month.
At its core, it is a pretty cookie cutter sci-fi movie, but it does a lot of things pretty well. I feel like it only falls short because everything in it has been done before; the work that went into it is pretty impressive. The most obvious movie that it is similar to is Groundhog Day, and the way that the time loop is handled here certainly takes a few pages out of Groundhog Day's book. This made the first few days of the time loop a little annoying to watch because I was like "Alright, I've seen this before. Let's just skip this part." However, once the second act starts, the movie starts exploring some new territory of the time loop dynamic.
Two things that I think it did particularly well with were 1. bringing an interesting emotional element to the plot and 2. constructing the rules of the time loop. It added a lot to the stakes of the plot by making Cage fall in love with Rita after having known her for perhaps several months or years, whereas she only knew him for the one or two days. Then to have him not be able to preserve her forever made for decent emotional access to Cage. The rules of the time loop made for a somewhat more interesting climax as well. With Cage having lost his "spawning" ability, there was now a major dramatic clock ticking. Since he had died hundreds of times before, something different had to be done in order to finally destroy the Omega. However, it didn't raise the stakes so much in my mind because the world that the movie created indicated to me that there was very little chance of the humans losing the war. Also, I'm not sure that I really believe they could have destroyed the Omega in the end.
Smaller details: the action was pretty cool with the way the aliens fought and the visual effects were pretty impressive. The minor characters, namely the other soldiers that Cage interacted with, were rather annoying and standard. Yes, they had personality, but all their personality amounted to was making them come off like poorly written teenagers. A couple of the time loop rules could have been explained better. For the most part, I was able to understand how it worked, but there were two or three details that I had to puzzle out. Some of that is just me missing the explanation, but it's also partly because such rules were not revealed at the proper time or in the best way.
I don't know that this deserves as high of a rating as it has. Not to say that it's bad, but to have it hovering just below the top 250 list seems too high to me. Tom Cruise is in his typical element here, though it may not seem so at first. Emily Blunt plays her part decently, but could have been played by someone else. Fortunately, she isn't sexualized as one might expect, though she is a love interest for Cage. I don't recommend it too highly, but it's a better pick than say Transformers, Independence Day, or Ender's game for alien sci-fi action. One thing I can say for sure in praise of it: there need to be more movies that are executed and written with as much care as was put into this one. Overall Rating: 8/10.