Don't Relive Yesterday

Rating: 8/10 (15 August 2014)

Edge of Tomorrow jolts viewers with never-before-seen imagery or story line while hinting, "Don't dwell on mistakes of the past," as Cage (Tom Cruise) is re-spawned through a time warp while experiencing the waste of war and making heroes from society's rejects & downtrodden.
The alien invader's blood is the key to the plot. As with royalty, bloodlines are depicted as a mechanism for time control. Although it seems like a battle with a fighting chance, the aliens have tilted the playing field in their favor using time control. When Cage gets the "blood-line" in him, he begins to win and the aliens decide he must be trapped by false illusions and controlled. At one point, we witness a scene where Cage's own human medics force him to have a blood transfusion, thereby emptying his time control power. The heroine Rita (Emily Blunt) also tells a story of undergoing dissection and ostracism after she was found to have sneaked into the blood-line.
Edge of Tomorrow gives a striking depiction of women and men sharing barracks. The top soldier Rita is a woman with a mechanized exoskeleton. Any pretense of gender roles are lost and we know it's a "real war". Women in combat isn't a popular vote platform in this movie, instead, it's reality. We are shown that the General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) intends to carry out death by conscription for Cage in a military where trumped up allegations are commonplace reasons for sending people to the Army. It reminds us of the "Press Gangs" used for hundreds of years in Great Britain to kidnap sailors. Actually winning the battle was an annoying side note for the General. Many references to D-Day are made where it was a zero sum intention calculated to win by mechanized industry in addition to lives lost. The aliens are depicted as strange mechanized beings without joy or mercy and we wonder, what are the aliens fighting for?
The crisis reaches its sharpest point when we realize it is up to J- Squad to steal a plane and save the day. J-Squad is made of misfits, mentally ill and above all, fighters who willingly give their lives to only be forgotten immediately after victory was realized. In Cage's perspective, the final day's battle took hundreds of grueling days, but to others, it was just a blurb on the news to discuss at a bar. And Cage relived the day of battle again and again, almost as if it might never end.