Movie Muser

 I get the feeling there was a bit of ‘I told you so’ going round in Hollywood after Edge Of Tomorrow failed to live up to financial expectations. And in true Tinsel Town fashion they decided the problem was the name. As a result it’s got a bit of a makeover for its home entertainment release, where the cover would suggest it’s called ‘Live. Die. Repeat’ – which to be honest is a much better name than the pretty much meaningless Edge Of Tomorrow.

The fact it barely cracked $100 million in the US certainly isn’t the film’s fault as it’s a great slice of big budget action, which for the first time in several years reminds us exactly why Tom Cruise is a movie star. And in an era of tentpole movies that try to outdo each other in how po-faced they can be (I’m blaming you, Christopher Nolan), it’s refreshing to find one that has a great sense of humour without being as dumb as much Hollywood fare (I’m blaming you, Michael Bay).

Cruise is Major Cage, who’s extremely confused when he’s railroaded into battle against some pissed-off tentacle aliens that have taken over much of the world, despite the fact he isn’t trained to fight. He’s sent off as a grunt into a beach battle – that’s deliberately reminiscent of D-Day – not even knowing how take the safety catch off his armoured exo-suit. Unsurprisingly it’s not long before he’s killed.

That should be the end, but Cage then wakes up and discovers that it’s the beginning of the previous day all over again. He repeats the process over and over again – getting killed every time – soon working out that he needs to team up with Rita (Emily Blunt), the only person who understands what he’s going through and who may be able to help Cage end the invasion completely.

It’s a film that’s a lot of fun, with great pace, humour and some expertly handled action scenes. There may be a few plot holes, but it’s edited together in such a way that it works as a cohesive whole, ensuring the endlessly repeated day is always moving forward even if time itself is stuck on a loop.

Cruise and Blunt have great chemistry and it’s good to remember that Tom can actually be funny when he wants to, even if most of the laughs revolve around the many and varied ways he dies.

Although the premise invites obvious comparisons to Groundhog Day, it’s more accurate to say that it’s like a live-action videogame, with Cage stuck at a save point and having to work out how to get to the boss at the end of the level. The movie has a lot of fun with the idea, with Cage having to learn the rules of the game and how to control his weapons, only able to move forwards once he knows how to fight and has worked out the puzzles.

Thrown into that mix are allusions to the Second World War and also action movies themselves, with Cruise’s antics showing what would actually happen very quickly to muscle-bound Hollywood-style heroes if they lived in the real world. For example there’s a great scene where Tom has to roll underneath a truck – the sort of thing most of his characters would do with ease – but here he immediately gets squished.

After all the fun and time-bending gymnastics, it’s a bit of a shame that the ending doesn’t quite live up to what’s gone before. It certainly wraps things up, but you get the sense that they never quite worked out how to conclude the film (as the features confirm, it went into production without a finished script) and so it’s a far more tick the boxes affair than the 100 minutes that run up to it.

As you would expect, Edge Of Tomorrow looks great on Blu-ray. That’s particularly true of the aliens, which start out as a strange mass of tentacles before you begin to pick out their form and the way they move. The effects are excellent and in HD you can really see the movie’s scope.

The features are also pretty good, with a couple of interesting featurettes about the exo-suits, the aliens and the creation of the beach battle, as well as a longer overview documentary about the entire production. They’re all very well-made and surprisingly entertaining (although the ‘Isn’t Tom Cruise awesome?’ quotes get a little tiring).

I’m hoping that the Live. Die. Repeat. name remodel works and Edge Of Tomorrow becomes a big hit on DVD and Blu-ray, as I really would like to see a follow-up.

Overall Verdict: Tom Cruise show off why he’s a star (after all, we’ve all forgotten) in a movie that’s entertaining, witty and often quite smart, with plenty of great action and good ideas.

Special Features:
Operation Downfall – Adrenaline Cut
‘Storming The Beach’ Featurette
‘Weapons Of The Future’ Featurette
‘Creatures Not Of This World’ Featurette
‘On The Edge With Doug Liman’ Documentary
Deleted Scenes

Reviewer: Tim Isaac

Some films manage to take a low budget and use it to their advantage, finding interesting and innovative ways to get around the fact they don’t have much cash and still deliver a full and complete film experience. Sadly Kite is not one of those films. It thinks it is, but it really isn’t.

The movie follows young Sawa (India Eisley) who lives in a scummy, corrupt post-apocalyptic future where she ruthlessly tries to hunt down the people who killed her parents, helped by her father’s ex-partner, Karl (Samuel L. Jackson). Things begin to change when she meets someone she knew as a child – although she can’t remember him due to the fact that the drugs she takes to help her be a single-minded and very successful killer blur her memory of the past.

Based on the classic Anime, Kite may have a great source but it’s a bit of a disaster in translation. The plot is confused and what there is doesn’t really hang together. The only things that do are pretty obvious if you give it even the tiniest bit of thought, which most people will realise the moment the properties of the drugs are mentioned.

The result is that it essentially becomes a series of fight scenes where even those paying attention might often be wondering exactly why this teenage girl is killing these people in as many gruesome ways as she can muster. Indeed I got the distinct impression that somebody saw Hit Girl in Kick-Ass and decided they essentially wanted to make a movie that was just her for 90-minutes. Sadly though it lacks the style and humour that made that character work and so here it often largely comes across as unpleasant.

Indeed the movie’s lack of style becomes an increasing issue as it goes along. All the cash has gone into the action, but that leaves the world it exists in feeling anaemic and under-realised. Only about 30 people seem to exist in the movie’s entire universe, and even the locations are utterly disconnected from each other, which underlines the sensation that this is a series of action scenes more than a movie. Even Samuel L. Jackson’s presence seems more calculated to allow his scenes to be shot in just a few days, rather than ensuring the film has what it needs to make that character work.

All in all, it’s a bit rubbish.

Overall Verdict: After years of talking about turning Kite into a film, the resulting movie suggests they shouldn’t have bothered.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac