Déjà Cruise

MANILA, Philippines - Tom Cruise didn’t so much get trounced repeatedly by aliens in Edge of Tomorrow, his latest sci-fi outing, as he did by that tween cancer weeper, The Fault in Our Stars, which whooped Cruise’s butt at the box office.

Which is a shame because, although the adaptation of John Green’s YA bestseller deserves attention, Edge of Tomorrow is actually one of the better Tom Cruise outings in recent history.

Granted, Mr. Scientology does too many dystopian future flicks (I wish I could erase Oblivion from my memory like they do in a Philip K. Dick novel). But he’s usually best when playing against type. In other words, playing sniveling, weaselly coward Major William Cage, a military PR flak who tries to get out of fighting aliens on the beaches of Verdun.

It’s the future, and aliens called Mimics have attacked many European cities, calling for a united military effort against their nasty, tentacled attacks. In a bit of WWII nostalgia, it’s the United States that leads the effort to free Europe from the “tentacles” of interplanetary fascism, with Cage/Cruise leading the public relations effort, getting millions of humans to sign up and fight.

But Cage is no soldier. Ordered by General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) to accompany troops on the battlefields of Verdun, France in a mop-up effort, Cage — sporting the usual Cruise shit-eating grin — declines. In fact, he makes a run for it, and soon finds himself shackled and drilled by a comically enthusiastic Master Sergeant Farell (Bill Paxton) at a military base in Heathrow Airport. Brigham, pissed at Cage for disobeying and threatening to blackmail him, wants to make sure the PR golden boy gets fragged the second he hits the beaches of France.

And that’s what happens. But Cage keeps waking up from his own death to see the day reenact itself, over and over again.

And each time, he learns just a little bit more, enough to become a better soldier and, in the manner of all Tom Cruise movies, a better human being.

Yes, the premise does resemble Groundhog Day, that priceless ‘90s Bill Murray comedy in which weatherman Phil Connors wakes up in Punxsatawney, Pennsylania over and over and over again, trying to find redemption and his way into the heart of Andie MacDowell.

But this is a dystopian future sci-fi, with lots of icky aliens and weird time-stopping angles to wrap your head around, plus the presence of super-tough female warrior Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt).

Yet it still manages to be funny, and there is actual chemistry between Blunt and Cruise, enough for you to enjoy their little tango of die, reload, repeat (which actually would have been a much better title than the generic Edge of Tomorrow).

The gag is that Cruise doesn’t have clue number one about soldiering — he can’t even get his fellow soldiers to tell him where the safety is on his techno weapons. So he quickly dies. And dies… and dies again. At one point, he tries to make a run for it while his platoon is doing pushups, rolling himself under a passing transport truck à la Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible — and promptly gets squished under the tires.

This is funny shtick — Mr. Action suddenly shown to be as hapless as a two-year-old — and Cruise has always possessed the comic timing to lampoon his own macho, Top Gun image. He just doesn’t get to do it enough in movies. It’s when he defaults to “serious” mode that he gets a tad tedious.

Playing off Blunt, Cruise learns a little bit about his situation with each nasty, brutish death: he should’ve stepped to the right a couple more inches; he should have dodged here instead of there. Apparently, Blunt and nerdy military biologist Dr. Carter (Noah Taylor) have figured out that the Mimics have a leader, called Omega, that can control time. By resetting the clock on the same day repeatedly, they have gathered enough data to win on the battlefield and conquer Earth.

But both Blunt and Cage have an advantage: they’ve been sprayed with alien blood just before they died, so they, too, possess the ability to roll back the clock.

Edge of Tomorrow is nothing radically new, it’s just a well-directed thriller (Doug Liman in good form) that pulls us along on its characters’ journey with fast, good intentions. One of the inevitable developments is that Cage starts to have protective, romantic feelings for Vrataski, whom he sees die over and over again on the battlefield. You get the sense it’s a memory he’d like to erase. And Cruise goes through pretty much the same character arc that Phil Connors did in Groundhog Day: denial, followed by nihilism and bitter resignation, followed by newfound wisdom and acceptance, followed by optimism and rebirth.

There’s a bit of Scientology in all this — the idea that humans were put here to live the same lives over and over until they get it right, or “clear” — but that’s probably just a coincidence. It also resembles Darwinism — the idea that out of a hundred million different variations and patterns, only one can survive to pass on its genes.

The movie resembles another modern phenomenon: the gamer’s life. The Edge of Tomorrow scenario is not unlike learning the hacks of a difficult video game through repeated play — when to jump, when to duck, which doors to avoid opening.

And speaking of déjà vu, one scene — Cruise holding a bunch of grenade pins just before a big boom goes off — was lifted straight out of his earlier film, War of the Worlds (2005). That, incidentally, was his last mega-hit (though his Mission: Impossible films still do respectable box office, and Jack Reacher was actually pretty entertaining) and one begins to suspect that audiences stayed away from Edge of Tomorrow not because it’s intrinsically bad (critics actually praised it), but because they still have bad memories of Valkyrie, Knight and Day and Vanilla Sky, and that couch-jumping episode on Oprah. Cruise may have a bit of box office poison in his system, and it’s an unfortunate condition I’m sure he wishes he could wake up from.