American ticket buyers continue to give Tom Cruise movies the stink-eye, but that doesn’t mean the films aren’t any good. Case in point: “Edge of Tomorrow,” a solid science-fiction thriller that didn’t amount to any great shakes at the domestic box office (though it fared better overseas).
The concept is mash-up of familiar ideas we’ve seen in other movies: creepy alien bugs are threatening to take over the Earth, and we’ve got to stand our ground. Cruise plays William Cage, a smarmy advertising exec-turned military spokesman, who finds himself dumped into a massive assault effort without any combat training or experience.
And… he dies.
Not surprising, given his applicable skillset (or lack thereof). What is surprising is that he wakes up, alive, and it’s the morning before the operation. He gives the mission another go. And dies. And tries again. Dies… though he lives a little longer this time.
It seems Cage got infected with some alien goo that affords him the power to travel through time and “reset the day,” a la “Groundhog Day.” So he makes it his duty to keep trying to find a winning solution to the disastrous war plan. He recruits an ally in Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), the gruff war hero he helped turn into a celebrity.
The action scenes are frenetic and absorbing, with Cage having to learn to use one of those cool exo-skeleton/armor thingees that seem so prevalent in sci-fi flicks these days. Director Doug Liman directed the first, and best, Jason Bourne movie, and knows how to keep the main character seem grounded amidst a fantastical backdrop.
The aliens are a bit of a disappointment, resembling balls of metallic tentacles that roll and thrash around the screen. They’re video-game boogums, meant to scare us and be blown away.
“Edge of Tomorrow” has occasional bouts of supreme silliness, but it’s worth a look… or two.
Video extras are OK. The DVD version comes with two featurettes: “Weapons Of The Future” and “Creatures Not Of This World.” Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo pack and you add another featurette on filming the storming of the beach, deleted scenes, an interview with Liman and an “Adrenaline Cut” of the film’s signature action scenes.
Some people are bound to dismiss "Edge of Tomorrow" as a mash-up of other, better science fiction movies. And there's no denying there are elements of other themes familiar to the genre -- alien invaders, time travel, nifty futuristic hardware, existential questioning of one's identity.
In fact, if someone hasn't already labeled it the love child of "Groundhog Day" and "Starship Troopers," then I'm copywriting the phrase.
But despite coming across as less than original, it's a compelling sci-fi thriller and a solid star vehicle for Tom Cruise. He's taken a beating in the press lately and his last few films haven't fared well at the box office, though I thought last year's "Oblivion" -- with which "Edge of Tomorrow" shares more than a few similarities -- was an exemplary example of the genre.
The kick here is that Cruise's character, William Cage, is thrown into a battle to retake Normandy from the alien bugs, dubbed "mimics." He's had no combat training, and can't even flip off the safety on his weapons. But he strives to persevere against the overwhelming odds and... dies almost immediately. Because that's exactly what would happen to someone in that situation.
Except that he wakes up on the morning of the day before the battle, and has to do it all over again. He lives a little longer the second try, but not much. He wakes up again, stays alive another bit more during the fight, and so on.
It seems that during his first foray, some special alien blood/goo got absorbed into his own system, giving him the same ability the alien overlord has to "reset the day." If things aren't going well for it in the battle, it travels back in time and tries again. Now Cage has the same power to use against the enemy.
The metaphysics and specifics of this are never really explained, and in some ways it's better that the filmmakers don't even try. This is hardcore suspension-of-disbelief territory, so the audience had better just swallow the conceit and move on.
Not only is Cage not a seasoned soldier when his journey begins, he's not even a particularly likeable guy. An advertising flack who lost his business when the invasion tanked the global economy, he was given a major's rank and the job of "selling the war" to young recruits. He was an expert at boosting the cool exo-skeleton "jacket" armor the soldiers wear, and idolizing heroes like Rita "The Angel of Verdun" Vrataski (Emily Blunt), who managed to kill hundreds of mimics on her first combat mission.
Turns out Rita previously had the same ability as Cage, and became an expert killer through hundreds of conquests that were constantly reset. But eventually the power fades, so the two team up to put an end to the hive mind of the aliens before the slaughter on the beach even begins.
If the comparison to "Groundhog Day" seemed a little strange at first, it soon becomes clearer. By reliving the same day over and over again, Cage gets countless attempts to set things right. He saves the life of one of his squad-mates, and maps out the battlefield with Rita in a seemingly futile attempt to win the beach head. He also tries warning his superiors about the disaster about to unfold, which goes nowhere.
There's a lot of action, obviously, but also some unexpected humor and pathos as Cage finds himself growing closer to Rita, only to watch her die day after day. Director Doug Liman ("The Bourne Identity") and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie, Jez and John-Henry Butterworth adapt the novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka by making the main character seem as real and grounded as possible in an unreal and bizarre setting.
If there's a weak spot, it's the aliens, which never really rise above the level of video game threat. Vaguely metallic, they look like balls of tentacles that whirl around the fight, not unlike those rubber Koosh Ball toys. They're just targets waiting to be blown up, and never seem to gather any real power of menace.
Still, "Edge of Tomorrow" is clearly a better-than-average science fiction thriller. Even if it steals from other movies, at least it borrows from the best.
"Aliens" holds a special place in my heart. It was around its release in 1986 that my love of movies escalated from a childhood fascination into a lifelong passion. Not coincidentally, that was also the summer I got my first official job -- at a movie theater, not surprisingly.
This was in the day when popular movies would hang around in cinemas longer than two weekends, and I remember we were still selling plenty of tickets for "Aliens" in its six month. This also gave me an opportunity to watch the movie over and over again, and learn to anticipate the audience's reaction to the various frights and laughs (and yes, there are plenty of them).
Conservatively, I've seen the movie at least 100 times, but not for a few years. I decided to pop it into my player and see how it looked on my new LED TV.
The film holds up really well in terms of the characters, the suspense and the ultra-creepy alien creatures -- which are so black and spider-like, they seem less like organisms than null space brought to life.
I was surprised to realize that some of the special effects don't hold up as well -- in fact, some of the shots of the drop-ship approaching and leaving the infected planet of LV-426 look downright hokey. But don't forget, writer/director James Cameron was not yet the box office king he would become, and the studio saw fit to invest him with a budget of only $18.5 million. Even in today's dollars, that's less than $37 million -- peanuts by summer-movie standards.
It's interesting that the film, a sequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 atmospheric horror-film-in-space, is generally regarded as an action movie. Go through it, and you'll realize the character and dialogue scenes far outweigh the kablooey stuff.
I made some notes while watching the film. The first 30 minutes is concerned with the rescue of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and setting up the outbreak on LV-426. The second 30 minutes is all about establishing what ultimate badasses the Colonial Marines are, and observing their infiltration into the wrecked colony.
It's almost all suspense-building, as Cameron expertly draws out the audience's mounting anxiety. Consider this: The first full-grown alien does not appear until after the one-hour mark.
A director's cut of "Aliens" is now widely available, and for the most part I think the additional scenes add richness to the film (while ratcheting up the ratio of dialogue-to-action even higher). With one exception: There's an early scene of the colony before the aliens infested them, and it's a total disaster for the movie-watching experience.
Here's why: It shows you the colony, the people, and the beginnings of the alien encounter. In other words, LV-426 becomes a known quantity. When the Marines arrive, you have a pretty good idea of what they're getting themselves into. The movie is so much more effective when the crew shows up, and we're completely bewildered about where they are and what happened.
Anyway, the actual first encounter with the aliens lasts about 15 minutes. Then there's another 30 minutes as the survivors figure out how they're going to get off the planet, and intrigue with the corporate toady, Carter Burke (Paul Reiser), who wants to take the aliens back to Earth for military research. The last 45 minutes is the chase as Ripley's gang is picked off as they try to hot-foot it to the rescue ship, and her final showdown with the alien queen.
I still love the interaction between the marines, and how distinctive the characters are despite not a whole lot of individual screen time or dialogue. People most remember Bill Paxson as nervous-nelly Hudson, Michael Biehn as the butt-kicking Hicks, and Jenette Goldstein as the muscle-bound Vasquez. ("Have you ever been mistaken for a man?" Hudson teases her. "No ... have you?" she cracks back.)
I admit that the character of the android Bishop (Lance Henrikson) has receded in my mind's eye. I seem to remember him as being much more in the middle of things, but he spends most of the movie stuck in a lab or sent off on a mission to summon the other drop-ship. He only really has two substantive scenes: The knife trick with Hudson in the mess hall (still a hoot) and getting split in two by the alien queen in the final sequence.
Narratively, Bishop essentially acts as a red herring, making us think he'll wig out and start killing people like the android from the last movie.
Other than "Avatar," most of Cameron's films have featured female protagonists, and the feminist themes of "Aliens" are pretty plain to see. The childless Ripley gloms onto the colony orphan Newt (a terrific Carrie Henn, in her first and only film role) out of maternalistic instinct.
(In a bonus scene in the director's cut, we learn that Ripley did have a daughter, who died of old age while she spent decades wandering space in hyper-sleep.)
It's a more mature vision of the action hero, as a woman who fights for her (adopted) family rather than some testosterone-fueled need to assert dominance.
Ripley was hailed as cinema's first bona fide female action hero, and we can see her footprints in more recent films such as this summer's "Salt."
For my money, "Aliens" remains the perfect summer movie.
