Edge of Tomorrow

In Flannery O'Connor's macabre short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find", a mass murderer called the Misfit butchers a squabbling family of irritating white trash.  After killing the matriarch of the family, the murderer sardonically observes that the dead granny "would have been a good woman if there had been somebody to shoot her every day of her life."  Tom Cruise's science fiction picture "Edge of Tomorrow" (Doug Liman, 2014) dramatizes the Misfit's bizarre slogan.  Cruise plays a cowardly and egotistical military officer, an advertising executive recruited to serve in a war against nasty extraterrestrial aliens who have captured all of Europe.  For reasons that film never makes clear, Cruise's pusillanimous officer finds himself embedded with a group of hardened combat veterans dropped D-Day style onto the French beaches to battle the beasties that have occupied the continent.  The aliens are ready for the assault and they massacre the attacking humans in a large-scale, spectacular battle scene that is far and away the best thing in the movie.  Within the first ten minutes, Tom Cruise is killed in combat.  Just as we are heaving a sigh of relief, Cruise comes back to life, the film looping back to its opening frames when we first saw our hero arriving in London for a colloquy with a gruff general that results in him being sent to the front again, once more humiliated by the other members of his platoon, dropped again out of the sky in robot-combat armor onto the beach only to die ignominiously once more.  After a short fade-to-black, Cruise is back in London, back in basic training, back on the beach again, where he manages to survive for an additional minute or so before the aliens kill him again.  And so the film continues, the first movie that I have ever seen that adopts as its structural principle the experience of playing obsessively a difficult and gory first-person shooter.  As in a computer game, each time Cruise's character dies, he immediately revives, recalls his past lives, and just as a gamer improves his skills with repetition, so the hero of "Edge of Tomorrow" gets slightly better with each iteration of the same situation, more agile, his aim improved with the BFG weapons that he wields and his running, ducking and jumping across the lethal beachhead better and better until he can avoid enough perils to participate in a kind of rudimentary plot.  Just as in Doom, or any other first-person shooter, it seems that if you are willing to "die" enough times, you can gradually learn the terrain, the weaknesses of your enemies, discover hiding places, and ambush sites from which to enfilade monsters, and gradually make your progress across the computer- (or in this case) film-labyrinth cohere into a quest, a narrative.  The film is unique in the way that it is constructed and the experience of the audience is a cinema analog to playing a computer game.  For the first forty minutes, "Edge of Tomorrow" is good, trashy fun -- it's great to see Tom Cruise thrashed to death by monsters, blown to pieces, squashed by passing trucks, falling to his death or lit on fire, or in a dozen cases so badly wounded that the female action hero -- a tough GI-Jane -- aims a pistol between the injured man's eyes, tells him to "try again", and blows his head off.  In the course of the film, Cruise is probably minced, sliced, diced a hundred times and some of the iterations of the situation are telegraphed to us in one or two three second shots -- Cruise in the helicopter about to be dropped onto the beach, for instance, a fire-ball, then, the hero neatly sidestepping the monster that killed him in the last round only to have falling debris crash into him like meteorite a second or two later.  In a weird way, it's actually comical.  The battle scenes are shot in bright light with thousands soldiers advancing through great tapestries of explosions and fire and the invasion is staged to look like Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan;" certainly, it can't be accidental that the film opened on the weekend that was 70th anniversary of D-Day -- the entire invasion and advance across the deadly beach is shot as if to parody that historical event and the sanctimonious movie about that battle.  This is "Saving Private Ryan," but from spindly metal tumbleweeds equipped with flailing tentacles and lion jaws -- that is, the aliens who bubble up out of the earth, look like insectoid bramble brushes and slash soldiers to death with their flailing tentacles.  As the movie lengthens, it develops a plot that is idiotic: something to do with time-travel and alien blood and a big orb-monster hiding in the basement of the Louvre of all places.  The more plot the film develops the weaker it becomes -- the movie's strength are the combat scenes which have some of the hysterical frenzy of the bug-battles in Starship Troopers, although lacking the almost comical gore in that film.   Cruise becomes increasingly, and more conventionally, heroic and, of course, has to save mankind -- the deterioration of his snarky self-absorbed PR man hero into a standard-issue action hero is one of the disappointments of the picture. The movie's climax in the watery bowels of the French art museum is another blue-screen extravaganza, a hurricane of murky explosions, darkness, and only half-seen creature effects -- it's the standard big-budget cop-out: CGI effects that don't really work, aren't convincing and so have to be buried in infernal gloom.  I don't understand how a movie that begins with such elegant, terrifying, and brilliantly visualized battle scenes can devolve into typical CGI fog -- it's as if the budget ran out 20 minutes before the movie ends and so the climax has to be staged in blurry darkness.   But here's my confession -- this isn't a terrible movie.  It's not a rip-off and the dim-witted plot is no more stupid than the plot of any other first-person shooter -- a rough-tough Duke Nuke'em has to navigate his way through an infernal obstacle course, dies a thousand times, but, finally, beats the horrific end-boss and wins the prize.  If you like first-person shooters, the film is pretty much irresistible and it achieves from a time to time a kind of morbid grandeur.  Tom Cruise is starting to show his age and, after dying a hundred times -- a score of deaths at the hands of his woman-warrior sidekick when he's been badly wounded -- the actor's face looks craggy, his eyes dull, and he displays a convincing "thousand yard stare," the look of a badly traumatized combat-veteran that is even a bit poignant.  The actor is growing into a grizzled and damaged old man, something that is all to the good.