Deja Vu.

Rating: 6/10 (31 October 2015)

This is one of those movies where you either have to pay careful attention to the plot or forget about the details and allow yourself to be swept up in the extravagant CGis. The viewer gets the feeling that some higher-echelon personnel at the studio watched "Groundhog Day" again and thought it was, well, just a colossal movie except for three things: (1) No CGIs, (2) No action, and (3) Too full of "character arc."
So we have a futuristic movie about a deskbound Marine Corps officer (Cruise) who is ordered to take part in an maximum effort attack on the Mimics who have invaded earth and must be destroyed on a battlefield with the resonant name of Verdun. Don't worry about the Mimics. They don't mimic anybody. They're just lightning-fast CGIs that look like overgrown woolly viruses. They're all managed by a central time-controlling apparatus called Omega. Verdun, okay. It's deliberate. But I take it as a coincidence that the thing controlling time carries the name of a famous wrist watch.
Eons ago, the movie critics were disappointed in a film called "Something Wicked This Way Comes" because they were promised computer-generated images and all they got were a few seconds of a choo-choo train plowing through the night. Even by 1975, in the first remake of "King Kong," there was muttering in critical circles that the giant ape was supposed to be a CGI and instead he was almost always a man in a gorilla suit -- a very well done gorilla suit, but still a gorilla suit.
I get a feeling that the time may have come to reconsider the value of CGIs. They do miraculous things for a movie when they're judiciously used. But now they're becoming excuses to build a movie around.
This isn't a bad movie as far as that goes. Tom Cruise remains a lightweight but not irritating presence. Emily Blunt, wearing little make up and with her hair, now blond, tied back is hardly recognizable. She always looks serious too. When she tries to smile, one almost hears the creaking of long-unused facial muscles. The temporals groan in agony. However, I like Emily Blunt a lot. She has asymmetrical features, and anyway someone who looks as serious as often as she does can't possibly be that serious.
But, man, is the imagery tiresome. Does everybody in the future have to wear those bulky suits made of metal and plastic with weapons built into the forearms and tiny iPods stuck all over the outside? People are whipped around by blows and blast at such a speed that inertia would tear their heads off. And they can fall the height of the Sears Tower and land alive with no more than a plop. Really.
It has moments designed to be amusing. Death is taken very lightly. Cruise doesn't simply fall asleep to start the day over again, like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day." He has to be killed. His colleague Blunt knows this. So every time they get into hot water she takes out her automatic and dispassionately shoots him in the head. Over hundreds of new days, Cruise is both frightened and bored by being shot in the head by a friend.
It's kind of enjoyable in its own dumb way. Bill Murray had a goal in "Groundhog Day" -- to romance Andy MacDowell, and he finally succeeds. Cruise and Blunt have a goal too -- putting Omega out of business, and they succeed too. Best performance: Brendan Gleeson as the shabbiest Marine Corps general in creation, now and forever, and the most subtle actor in the cast.