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Edge of Tomorrow

Or as some wag writing in to the BBC's film review show put it - Saving Private Groundhog. Wish I'd though of that. The similarity to Groundhog Day is pretty clear but it doesn't lose anything for it. Someone was going to re-use that high-concept conceit and I'm pretty glad it was a Sci-Fi film and not some dodgy rom-com or something (Richard Curtis missed a trick here - though About Time treads similar ground).

In fact, here in Japan they've gone with the name of the original manga book, All You Need is Kill. Wait, what? Kill can be used as a noun, can't it? Good enough for me. Apparently the book differs slightly in that the protagonist is a raw recruit, not the cowardly press officer that Cruise plays in the film. If you have Cruise, you have to fit the part to him, not t'other way round, but this works as the character has a pretty curvy arc.

A word about Mr. Cruise. He's not terrible here. I'm not his biggest fan and he did his signature 'hand acting' thing once, but he does have the star wattage to hold a film like this together. Emily Blunt is great but she's never anything less and the two leads have a bit of a spark together. The director, Doug Liman said something about this being an indie love story dressed up as a summer blockbuster. Hmmm. He also said that if you hate Cruise, this is the film for you (reason apparent on viewing).

So I enjoyed Edge of Tomorrow for the most part. It's a lot of fun with a few nice comedic touches. Slightly disappointed with the ending and confused reading the posts on imdb.com that try to make sense of it but, as with most time travelly films, I went with it. I say slightly because I spent hours after watching it trying to posit alternative endings to myself and came up with similarly unsatisfying ones. So rather than second-guessing Liman and the writers, I hereby accept this ending.......

You're welcome.

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