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.
I had some additional thoughts. The Omega organism had the power to reset time if an Alpha was killed. This allowed it to avoid that death and to eventually win the battles, etc. Now if Cage has gained the same ability from the blood of the Omega, can he reset with suicide and change outcomes like assassinations etc. or is that a once of. We did not see the Omega suicide. It reset with the Alpha information. So he reset and since he has no Alpha appendages, Cage can no longer reset. thoughts?
I am going on the assumption that alpha blood enabled the one day reset, but omega blood allowed the reset to the beginning of that day. The power of the omega is not gone, just in Cage. Question: 20 years from now when Cage is, say, in an auto accident and dies, does he reset and to when?
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The problem with the ending is that it violates the rules of the piece. In every other instance where the character ‘resets’ the world reverts to the same state. Characters that died are alive, no one had foreknowledge, etc. But when he kills the Omega and jumps back, the Omega is dead, hours before Cage killed it. I was expecting that the jump back would be far larger and the invasion would have never happened as the Omega no forewarned of its death on Earth, aborts its invasion. A reset that alters the past had not been established before then ending and it a cheat.
The other cheat is the sex joke…she would not be the character remembering the attempts to transfer the power via frolic, it would have been Cage, but that would have been less funny and stuck many as sexist.
I have been to the movies 4 times since the early part of the year. Godzilla 2 and this one 2. The motivation of the invasion is not explained since it is treated more like an invasion of black plague, if the bacilli had three forms and telepathic communication for need. They arrive on an asteroid, attack because that is what they do, and the “omega” prime bacillus resets time when it loses a battle, etc. I actually thought they handled it fairly well. I am NOT a big Tom Cruise fan and I saw this one twice.
The ending giving him omega power is a cop out if you want a truly satisfactory sf ending. He dies, the whole group he uses dies, but the dday force is saved as is the earth, and Cruise’s character goes down in history as a deserter.
What I did notice was the release on DDay anniversay week with so much copying of the ww2 d day stuff. The infestation begins in Germany, Russian forces push from the East while Brits and Americans prepare a new Normandy.