Edge Of Tomorrow
“Edge Of Tomorrow (2014)”
Text By: Basil Swartzfager
Original Publication Date: August 10th, 2014
Most people who have seen Edge Of Tomorrow seem to not like its ending. It feels tacked on. It undermines the emotional payoff of Tom Cruise’s sacrifice. It doesn’t make narrative sense. I agree with all of those remarks, and it’s one of the main reasons I like the movie so much.
Edge Of Tomorrow gains most of its power from its meta-reflexivity. People are quick to call it the an action movie Groundhog Day, or Video Games: The Movie. The first analogy doesn’t hold for me. Groundhog Day is a smug admonishment about that old carpe diem mantra. The film suggests we have the opportunity to pack each day with an endless, life-changing experiences, but instead we stick ourselves in the same dull routines. In retrospect the film’s message comes off as crassly privileged in its supposed humanism. Video Games: The Movie is closer to the truth, in that the film presents Cruise’s character with a limited range of options and asks him to figure out a way to succeed (i.e. not die) within those constraints. But I think both ignore the specificity of Edge Of Tomorrow’s aims, which are all about the construction of action within cinema and the arbitrariness of action movie stakes.
Firstly, the repetition of actions over and over offers a meta joke on stunt work and choreography. It’s designed to look natural, to look as though it is occurring for the first time right in front of us. But in fact it is the absolute opposite of that. It’s a series of movements so intricately rehearsed, so timed in coordination with all of the film’s other elements (camera movement, editing, sound design, etc.) that it could not possibly go any other way -- unless, of course, someone makes a mistake, and then they have to redo it. This commentary is most apparent when Cruise walks Blunt through a battle zone, giving her specific directions on where to step, when to shoot, how far to move backwards or forwards. Cruise functions as a choreographer in these scenes, knowing the entire result from start to finish as he walks one of the participants through it. We see the frustration that comes with each failure, the seething teeth-gritting that someone else can’t get right what you can so clearly see in your head. One of the film’s greatest strengths is the way it refracts almost every situation back towards the act of making the film itself.
Edge Of Tomorrow also plays with our emotional involvement in movie tropes, by taking the action movie’s single immovable narrative rule -- the hero can’t die -- and inverting it completely. Edge Of Tomorrow consists of almost nothing except watching Tom Cruise die. What begins as horrible and harrowing (with one glaring exception, the beach battle is the most relentless and awful sci-fi war scene since Starship Troopers) soon becomes comical in its ridiculous, endless death parade. It highlights how silly our emotional involvement is in action movies, how little it all means. We can’t connect to it on a true emotional level, and we aren’t supposed to, because the movie keeps telling us that it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about Cruise, he can’t die. He gets to keep trying again. It calls attention to the artificiality of audience manipulation in action filmmaking. He both dies and cannot die, and we are invited to see the oddity of that construction.
This is where the ending comes in. We think the film will end with all the characters dead, having nobly sacrificed themselves to defeat the alien occupying force. In what feels like a final shot Tom Cruise floats in a pool of water, impaled, the life seeping out of him in his moment of triumph. It’s a distressing scene. Through the course of the film we have laughed at Tom Cruise dying multiple times, but now we don’t want him to die. His character has become real to the audience. Then the real ending happens. Cruise is enveloped in the bright blue time-shifting goo, and the audience is whisked back in time, much farther back than the film has ever gone before. Before the beach, before the invasion, before anyone died. They are all alive, and the aliens are still dead. It is the most “Hollywood ending” a movie could ever have. An inexplicable deus ex machina that resurrects all of the characters we’ve come to care about. In this way the film doubles back to its initial promise, to highlight how meaningless our emotional investment in the fantasy of movies is. The film spent almost an hour telling us it was meaningless, then changed its mind and told us it wasn’t, and we immediately believed it again. Edge Of Tomorrow knows what big dummies we are, but it understands why we love being dumb. Far from being a cop out, I think the ending fulfills the movie’s initial promise in the smartest way it could.
-Basil Swartzfager, 2014
