Why does a good movie bomb at the box office? Hard to say why this happens from time to time. Edge of Tomorrow is not doing well at the theater, even though it seems the people that do see it are loving it, including reviewers (71% on Metascore, a whopping 90% on Rotten Tomatoes). Whether it was poor marketing, strong competition, or just an audience tired of sci-fi over the last couple years, this great film is going relatively ignored.
Edge of Tomorrow takes place in a near-future Earth where an alien race has landed and is wiping us out. It gets you into the action pretty quickly, when Tom Cruise’s character, a major in the armed forces that has risen in the ranks due to politics but knows nothing about combat, is thrust into the main front. He dies pretty quickly, but wakes up the previous morning in a Groundhog Day-like fashion, with no one else aware. It turns out the aliens have the ability to time shift, which they do whenever they lose a battle, so they can re-fight it and change the outcome, while the humans are none the wiser and thus lose every fight. Cruise has now leached this power, and relives the same 2 days over and over. With this power he is able to learn more and more each day in hopes of overcoming the alien threat before they locate him and stop his loop, learning from Emily Blunt’s character, a seasoned trained fighter, as she too was once in a loop before she lost the ability.
It all sounds very fantastical, and while it seems extremely far out there and hard to grasp, the movie presents it in a fashion that is easy to follow. Obviously it has stunning effects, which is expected in a big budget film, but it is also much more than just a shoot-em-up disaster movie. Cruise’s emotions play out, from hope when he realizes he has this time loop on his side to help him defeat the threat, to despair when nothing he does seems to stop the threat over the hundreds (thousands?) of days he repeats. The big finale is wholly unexpected too. This is a film worth seeing on the big screen, and I hope more people do before its gone.
Jons Movie Takes 