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| Photo courtesy NASA image archives |
The movie has Cruise's character, Major Bill Cage, repeating the final hours (why only hours, though?) of his death before he is killed by alien invaders and ends up covered in weird blue alien blood that mixes with his human blood. See, the alien blood contains some time-traveling properties that allow Cage to relive the past, over and over, Groundhog Day-style, and thus empowers him, and anyone he can convince to join him in his efforts, to tweak future conditions so that the outcome is different in each newly relived reality.
This is the grand attraction of the plot: imagine being able to shuttle back and forth in time to a particular moment, just to see how a specific scenario will play out. Great special effects take a front seat in this movie, but unfortunately the initial characterizations limit the experience and the film comes off as a series of been-there, seen-that setpiece props: the nervous, untested combat virgin; the seasoned, tough-as-nails veteran; the jaded and unwelcoming infantry squad. We've seen those story elements before, and to quote the eminent editor and writer Gardner Dozois, that's usually the problem with a majority of science fiction fare.
Now, there's a functional limit to Cage's time-travel ability -- first he has to die, and then he returns to the moments roughly 12 hours prior to his very first combat mission. The alien hive mind, meanwhile, has the ability to detect Cage's time-tripping jaunts and will eventually zero in on his ass and smoke him before he can do any lasting damage. Cage is summarily told by Blunt's character, Sergeant Vrataski, that when he stops seeing "visions" of the alien hive, he then loses the ability to reset his personal time-loop, and his next dance with death will be his last. This portion of the story holds more originality, but it is never fully explained and becomes the pea under the mattress that threatens to unhinge the whole experience.
I'm leaving out a lot of plot details but you get the essential drift of the story: Cage can reset time when he dies and alter future conditions to bring about a different outcome, one that prolongs or even avoids his death. So many questions flew out of my brain when I pondered the idea. The main problem, however, is the central-timeline theory, that there is a single, universal time-flow and in changing it, everyone in our known plane of reality is affected. This is different from what I see as more popular versions of time; namely, that each timeline can have its own universe based on the outcomes. It certainly makes for more entertaining fiction, anyway.
Which outcomes, though? And if we have only one outcome, for an alien species to be able to use time travel against us, wouldn't they have the ability to see far into the future and prevent Cage's meddling in the first place? Would time even be so delicately arranged in this way, subject to the most minor tamperings? I mean, seriously, one dude on one planet in one solar system can cause this kind of havoc to the universal time-stream? Physicists can probably assert with authority that the universe's timeline behaves according to rigid rules; otherwise, what a pushover time would turn out to be.
But back to the movie. Cage is not alone in his efforts to stop the time-hopping aliens with some time-hopping of his own. Soon after getting zapped back in time, he again sees the Angel of Verdun still alive, getting PR'd to death as the Full Metal Bitch (a nod to Stanley Kubrick's classic war movie Full Metal Jacket). Blunt's character, Sergeant Rita Vrataski, typifies the popular subgenre of the physically fit female ass-kicker, and Blunt's later scenes serve to breathe some three-dimensional life into what starts off as a character archetype. Blunt's facial expressions and poise make her character believable, however, which is honestly an amazing transformation considering her prior work as the snooty personal assistant of her breakout role in The Devil Wears Prada. In this movie, she essentially occupies the role of Cage's mentor and combat instructor, and the scenes where she repeatedly executes Cage to reset the time and get him into shape for the mission of their lives are among the most entertaining of the entire film.
I didn't get to read the book, which was written by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and which was the source for the film. I would like to imagine that there are some more complex ideas in the book that didn't translate to the big screen for the usual reasons of running time and the producers' or director's preferences for final cut. However, Sakurazaka's novel was written for the Japanese young adult market in what Japanese publishing calls a wasei-eigo, or "light novel" in Western parlance, and in that market it is pretty much the decedent of pulp fiction in the 40,000- to 50,000-word range. So maybe the whole time thing wasn't intended to be a fully developed concept in the first place. If accurate, that is a shame.
And that is what hamstrings the film. One comes away with the sense that director Doug Liman intended to elevate this movie with deeper meaning which in the end just wasn't there. Why did the aliens choose to attack Europe first? Why do they want Earth in the first place? Are the attacking aliens merely an invading infantry force with a hierarchy of higher-level aliens directing them from elsewhere, or are they just a massive enclave of extraterrestrial Huns? So what happens when an alien dies? Whose time loop are we resetting there, and wouldn't that alone suggest a multiverse rather than a universe for the purposes of time? And seriously, what kind of military service are the major characters in that allows them to wear their hair past regulation length, despite the haircuts of their surrounding cast? (OK, that last one is a pet peeve).
The idea as presented in Edge of Tomorrow serves as a decent plot device, but without answers to some pretty basic "wait a minute" questions, it sort of bangs its head on the ceiling of the above musings and limits its storytelling power. Science fiction is about blowing your mind away with new ideas that make you look at the world with a different perspective. The first science fiction stories were mechanisms that transported us to a different time and place in order to look back at the present and effectively criticize the social and political strictures of the day. Sometimes asking a question is enough, but when it sprouts more questions that only exist to confound rather that coax a happy contemplation, the story loses some steam. In the case of this movie, I was certainly entertained but not exactly blown away by it.
There is a suggestion in the movie that the size of the alien creatures with this time-travel blood have an effect on the temporal distance that this time-loop reset can achieve, but it is only a hint. When Cage finally manages to kill the hive-brain (think of it as an alien regional headquarters), he gets his reset moment pushed all the way back to two days before his combat drop, and well ahead of his meeting with General Brigham, which is where his predicament started in the first place. It's not really a criticism, since I enjoyed the movie, but it raises larger questions that don't get answers. I just wished there had been more meat in the whole time-travel sandwich than this film offered. Liman already knows how to choreograph his set-pieces to build suspense and drive the story forward, and these traits are on full display in this movie, with action creating the momentum that story logic tends to drag down if you think about it too much.
But for us creative types, a final question: how much time (no pun intended) should a writer invest in working out his/her own theory of time, in those stories where time travel is used? Want to know how bad it gets? Google up theories of time and get into the whole A-theory and B-theory shit, and it will make your head spin. Maybe, like Cage in the movie, this is all we can afford to know right now. Whatever "now" is, of course.
