A little later than I would have liked, my sweetie-wife and I went out this morning caught a matinée showing of the SF film, Edge of Tomorrow. The premise, if you haven’t seen any of the trailers, is rather ‘alien invasion meets Groundhog Day’. Tom Cruise plays Major Cage, an American military PR Officer who has never seen a day of combat, now suddenly thrust into the largest invasion in human history. Untested, untrained, and unworthy this is not the sort of assignment Cage wants to participate in.

The invasion is against an alien infestation that has taken Europe. One of the smart elements in this film is that the alien’s are not presented so much as invaders but more like a parasitic infection on the planet’s eco-system. This intelligently avoids one of the major pit-falls in attempting an alien invasion plot, mainly that any race with starships and easy access to orbit, wins again an opponent who does not posses those qualities. Another element I need to praise is the screenwriters avoiding any specificity in why this has happened. They didn’t come here for our women, our gold, or our water, (elements all used in rather dumb fashion in other alien invasion movies.) and the motivations of the aliens are left, unknown.

Cage’s acquires a talent, which causes him to ‘reset’ time whenever he is killed, causing the character to be the only person with memory of the day’s events that for him are past and for all other the future. Given Cages limitations and faults personality-wise, he is unable to convince others of his intelligence save for the mythically heroic Sgt Rita Vrataski a woman credited with hundred of alien kills. Together they must find a way to use Cage’s talent to turn the war before humanity loses it all.

The film is rather well put together and I would say 95% of the time plays by its rule-set, it does however abandon the rules of its setting for a cheap joke and to deliver a final ending that for me is somewhat unsatisfying. It was not so much as to cause me to regret seeing the film in the theater, and it’s light-years ahead od ‘Sphere’s’ terrible ending, but it was in the final moments, a cheat. How much this bothers you will be a purely idiosyncratic effect. Certainly for the genre of SF films focused on alien invasion this one works far better than most and is worth at least one viewing.