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Movie Review: Edge of Tomorrow

For anyone that has seen and loved “Groundhog’s Day,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Ironman” and “Transformers,” here is a movie that combines the best parts, the mediocre parts and the completely random parts of all of them. “Edge of Tomorrow” tells the story of Major William Cage, played by Tom Cruise, a man who is all about public relations and making wars seem like a good idea. Major Cage finds himself forced into service in the war against the Mimic, an alien race that is probably the most baffling part of the entire movie. The Mimic are a strange hive minded race that look like some distant cousin of Groot from “Guardians of the Galaxy,” strange tree creatures that move very fast and are kind of terrifying in their vagueness. In order to fight these foreign enemies from some unknown world, the people of Earth have created a strange exoskeleton armor that makes them stronger. These suits of armor are a strange mix of the Iron Man suit and the Pacific Rim robot outfits.

In his very first day (ever) of combat, Major Cage manages to kill a subset of Mimic, called an Alpha, but dies in the process. However, he then wakes the previous morning, yes, previous, as in the day before he died. He writes it off as a strange sense of deja vu, until the same thing keeps happening over and over again once he is killed. This is where the story bears resemblance to “Groundhog’s Day.” Major Cage is forced to live the same day over and over again. In one of the seemingly endless battles that he is forced to partake in, Major Cage saves the life of Sergeant Rita Vrataski, played by Emily Blunt, the woman who is the face of the fancy armor, and who is a war hero in her own right. Just moments before they both die she tells him, somewhat cryptically, ‘Come find me when you wake up.’ When Cage next wakes up back the day before, he goes to find her. It takes him a few days and a few lives but when he does she explains that she has experienced the same thing that he is currently experiencing, she too has lived a single day over and over again.

Together they figure out that in order to end the war with the Mimic, and therefore save humanity, they need to find the ‘brain’ of the hive minded Mimic race. In order to do that they have to find the place that Major Cage has started to see in visions in his mind, as if his weird predicament couldn’t get any weirder. Watch as Tom Cruise dies over and over and over again, so many times that people might think that they actually walked into a Sean Bean movie, to race against the clock. Yeah, that clock that seems to start over constantly. Maybe he isn’t in as much of a time crunch as he thought. He kind of has never ending time, there are worse things to ask for when trying to track down an enemy that is nearly impossible to find.

While the movie might have numerous recurring characters, who are there everyday, most people will only really remember Tom Cruise, as a time traveling con artist of a sort, and Emily Blunt, a bad ass woman who is the real leader in the movie. Together the two of them will repeat the same scenes over and over again, which probably means it only took them like four days to film the entire movie. Jump cut after jump cut, the audience will watch to see who is going to die next. Spoiler alert: Tom Cruise dies a lot.

Overall, “Edge of Tomorrow” is a movie that will defy all expectations. People going into it are about ninety percent sure that they are going to see another cheesy and kind of crappy Tom Cruise movie, not that there is anything wrong with that (everyone loves a good cheesy action movie). However, walking out of the theater or the living room or Bunker Auditorium, people will actually be talking about how surprisingly good a film it is.



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