EDGE OF TOMORROW (2014)

EDGE OF TOMORROW. Doug Liman, dir. Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth, script, from the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. Oliver Scholl, prod. design. USA/Australia: Warner Bros., Village Roadshow, et al. (prod.) / Warner Bros. (primary dist.), 2014.

Recombinant cinema with elements familiar from such works as the novel and film Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman's Forever War, the classic creature-feature THEM! (1954), the war/Horror film ALIENS, War of the Worlds, plus the time-loop motif from GROUNDHOG DAY (1993) other works,— and, for for some viewers if not the makers, THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY(1964): combined with wit, style, and a video-game esthetic — the tagline is "Live, Die, Repeat" — into a highly respectable movie. Significant here for a kind of absence. In Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Haldeman's Forever War novels, powered armor and military drop-ships transporting infantry are of science-fictional significance. Such elements are visually impressive in EDGE but of no more significance than a helicopter and what may be an SUV. Similarly, Ellen Ripley's putting on, and then later taking off, an exoskeleton in ALIENS to fight the Alien Queen is a powerful symbol; the exoskeleton powered armor suits in EDGE are just highly lethal First-Person-Shooter weapons; and nothing is made of the H. R. Gigeresque nature of the alien-invader "Mimics"<> and their combining the mechanical and organic, with suggestions of nonvertebrate hydras and squids. That the high-tech war toys are just sort of there, like powerful weaponry in a "mundane" war film, may be a good sign or a bad one; but it is probably a sign of something. ¶Note, though, the training scenes and the representation of the alien menace as what look like randomly-moving, but very flexibly and quickly moving, Cuisinart blades, which can chop up the human trainee or at least send him — it's the male lead we see knocked around — into a bone-breaking crash against wall or floor.

5. DRAMA, RDE, 07-09/VI/14