Entertaining movie but lacks inspiration. 75%

Rating: 7/10 (4 July 2014)

It was interesting to learn that this movie was based on a Japanese 'manga' called - amusingly - "All you need is kill" by Hiroshi Sakurazaka (it sounds like one of those awful translations generated from a poor web based translation service!). Wikipedia says it was a novel with pictures but then turned into a manga as well. Be that as it may...
The story itself is nonsense on stilts - of the kind that a small child could punch holes in the logic of - Earth is invaded by aliens humans dub "mimics". For the life of me I can't work out the relationship between that name and what they look like. The aliens look pretty abstract, which perhaps affected the way that I responded to them. They look computer generated and not nearly effective aesthetically as the non-computer generated alien in the movie "Alien" or its sequels.
The biggest nonsense of this movie is that the aliens have the ability to control time...to 'reset' to an earlier point in time which allows them to learn from their mistakes and thus defeat humanity's best efforts. If you've seen any ads for this movie you'll realise that Earth's hero, Major William Cage (played by Tom Cruise) acquires this time shifting ability of the aliens.
Earth's resistance is co-ordinated by the UDF (United Defence Force), of which Major Cage will soon become a servant. The UDF's leader is General Brigham (played by Brendan Gleeson), an Englishman who - early on, especially - has a pinch of Winston Churchill about him. Tom Cruise's Major Cage has a pinch of Jack Nicholson about him early on too. Perhaps it was a choice of the film makers not to have the Earth's defences led by the US...as in it comes across as a 'team' effort to defeat the aliens, not the Americans being the sole heroes...then again, perhaps it's in the original novel too?
Whilst set in the future, the imagery is not unlike something you might see in representations of World War I...and its sequel too, perhaps.
More than one professional review mentions how this narrative device of time travel is like a video game. I can see that. Perhaps like a 'noob' war video game player, Major Cage is a coward but by a process of constantly dying at the hands of the enemy (that is where the time travel 'reset' device comes in), Cage eventually becomes a worthy opponent to the aliens...a hero, in other words. It's this kind of unrealistic and video game like 'cheat' which makes you wonder how much honour there is in potentially defeating the aliens by dying at their hands so often...but that is how the aliens came to be winning the war against humans in any case.
The female character of Sergeant Rita Vrataski (played by Emily Blunt) has an interesting strand to her backstory. It concerns how she got the epithet "Angel of Verdun" and how that relates to the aliens' 'long game' as far as their war with humanity goes.
The concept of this movie was exciting and interesting to me but despite being an entertaining movie in itself, it didn't scale any greats heights for me. It lacks joy. It is, after all, a boy's own adventure tale. It just did not sweep me away like a movie of this sort should. Ideally you'd want the movie to be rousing and to love the characters. Perhaps one could say it is a little bit sterile in this regards?
A sort of similar movie to this is "Source code", which I gave 10/10 to on this site. Even though my memory of this movie has faded, I do remember that I loved it. Like "Edge of tomorrow", it is not the acting or the characters or the script which win you over. Despite both having this 'flaw', "Source code" manages to achieve a level of greatness which "Edge of tomorrow" doesn't.
Lastly, I'll just mention liking the score for the end credits...after the song. I liked the stereo field created in the cinema...how the music pans from one side to another and creates an aural space.
Not a bad movie, in other words...but nowhere near as good as "Source code"...or the truly great "Dark city"...or even "The 13th floor", which are all similarly 'concept movies.