Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman and starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, is a time-loop movie. There aren't many of those out there--certainly not many good ones. Everyone automatically thinks of Groundhog Day, and more recently Palm Springs took a fairly good stab the concept (and the T.V. show Russian Doll, but I haven't seen that yet), but Edge of Tomorrow is the closest to my tastes, fitting neatly into the sci-fi/action genre I do so enjoy.
I really do like this movie, but it always loses me around the Third Act, and today I want to take a look at why.
Edge of Tomorrow's Third Act revolves around the final offensive against the 'Omega', the alien life form that is responsible for resetting the day. To do this, Cage and Vrataski (Cruise and Blunt) enlist the aid of J-Squad, a squad of misfits that Cage gets assigned to at beginning of the day every time it resets. J-Squad evokes a memory of the marines from Aliens, but unlike those marines, J-Squad gets left behind in the narrative early on. They're a hurdle for Cage to overcome, not characters in their own right. So when they join up with our two main characters later on, I don't really care about them or like any of them or remember any of their names. Watching them (spoilers) die in the assault feels more like necessary cog-turning than the emotional moments they could've been.
Or maybe I'm wrong. The time-loop premise by definition restricts room for growth of secondary characters who aren't aware they're in a time loop by resetting them back to their original state over and over again. In a movie, too, actual time is a factor--the movie can't be four hours long as Cage gets to know these characters intimately so that later we feel for their deaths. Was this just a necessary trade-off the movie had to make? I think maybe it was.
You might think that I'm overthinking the role of characters who are essentially cannon fodder, but when it comes at the cost of me disengaging from the movie right before it hits its climax, I think it's a bit of a problem. It's even more of a problem because the story loses sight of Cage and Vrataski's relationship during this sequence. I understand that it can be pretty normal for action blockbusters to lose sight of their characters during their action scenes, but I think with a bit of refocusing, it might have been possible to structure the beginning of the Third Act to include more of Cage and Vrataski's dynamic and maybe get that first and final kiss to hit with a little more impact.
I still think the story is a success despite these Third Act hiccups. There's a reason I've seen it many, many times. Much of that enjoyment comes from Cage's transformation from cowardly P.R.-guy to battle-hardened tough-guy. It's not deep, but it's a lot of fun. Even the Third Act is fun, in a turn-off-your-brain kind of way. I just think that with a few tweaks, it could've packed a bit more of an emotional punch.
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