Surprisingly enjoyable

Rating: 7/10 (24 October 2014)

I have to say that this movie was surprisingly enjoyable. I did have my doubts about it. I always have doubts about movies that manipulate time. I guess one advantage the movie has is that it does not really involve time travel and changing the past to influence the future but "only" resetting a day and living it over and over again.
The entire concept is of course still totally ludicrous. Even if we forget about the feasibility about resetting time altogether there are just so many things that are wrong with the concept. For example, is time reset all over the universe or just on Earth? Both of those avenues create their own issues further down the line of course. Even if we try to forget these larger issues there are the issue that as soon as Cage altered his own behavior from one repetition of that day to another he would alter the chain of events and what he knew was the events in the previous repeat would no longer be certain in the one he was living right then. Not to mention that he had a longer and longer chain of people to convince on a single day and still get the job done.
Okay, enough harping about that. If you manage to lock out all these annoying issues with the story what remains is, as I wrote before, actually a fairly enjoyable movie. It is primarily a science fiction action movie of course and the action as well as special effects are not bad at all. We get treated to plenty of the classical déjà vu scenes were Cage tries to convince people by predicting their immediate future in minute details. Classical and very not innovative but well done and I have to admit that I am a bit of a sucker for these impress-and-surprise someone scenes. On the whole the movie managed to use the basic concept of reliving the day and make it feel reasonable fresh despite it not being a entirely new idea. The fact that the acting was quite adequate and that both Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt made a good performance as far as I am concerned of course helped.
Naturally the movie builds up towards the climactic battle against the alien central organism and of course everyone (who Cage managed to convince) have to throw in their lives to get Cage in position for the final attack. Personally I liked the ending although I have to say that I was a bit miffed that the writer did not manage to come up with some more imaginative ending scene between Cage and Rita though.
Bottom line, an enjoyable movie well worth watching.