Edge of Tomorrow

All you need is [to] kill [your script]

Is it still a ripoff of Source Code if it’s based on a Japanese light novel?  I’ll leave that to experts on things that don’t matter.  What Edge of Tomorrow does well is the blending of self-conscious humor into a run-of-the-mill doom/gloom alien invasion movie, complete with the characters becoming exhausted at the very mechanics of the sci-fi world they inhabit.  What’s exhausting to the audience, however, is its way of simply taking names of things from a book with a rich background, then providing none of that background, centering on two protagonists who should be starring in their own very different movies, and balling it all up with generic American military values and expecting everyone to care.  When Bill Paxton’s jokey, mustachioed Sergeant Farell character pontificates that “battle is the great redeemer” for the hundredth time, I start to suspect that the filmmakers and I have different thoughts on what constitutes parody.

An alien race known as Mimics (a name never explained in the film) are taking over Europe, and an incredibly badass soldier named Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), has had recent success in battling them.  Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) is ordered by British General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) to cover Operation Downfall, supposedly the humans’ endgame against the Mimics, on the beaches of France, to which Cage declines, citing no real combat experience.  Brigham, however, has Cage railroaded, and he awakens on an operating base at Heathrow Airport.  There, he is pressed into service with “J Squad,” a group of rejects that makes egregious use of the No Girls Allowed Clause.  He’s introduced as a deserter, and J Squad plans to make him their resident redshirt.  However, once the assault begins, it becomes apparent that the Mimics knew about the attack, and the entire force is decimated, including Cage after he attacks an abnormal “Alpha Mimic.”  But the movie can’t end after twenty minutes.  Cage wakes up back at Heathrow, and the day repeats exactly the same way.  We start to think maybe we should have paid attention to little things that happened the first time around.

From here, the film takes on the structure of a video game, from the constant “respawning” whenever Cage dies, to the “leveling up” he must do while learning to operate his futuristic mobile suit.  On the second loop, the version of Rita on the battlefield instructs Cage to “Find [her] when [he] wakes up,” and the next time the day begins, he approaches Rita herself, something everyone else knows better than to attempt.  But she knows exactly what’s happening to Cage, because up until recently, it was happening to her.  She and brainiac Carter (Noah Taylor) have spent plenty of time studying the Mimics, and have learned that the aliens obey the Omega Mimic, a gigantic Charybdis-like creature that hides underwater and has the power to restart the day whenever it wants to, explaining how the Mimics just happen to have the jump on the humans every time.  Due to the Law of the Inevitable Coincidence that governs most movies like this, the Omega has inadvertently passed this power on to Rita and Cage, and is hunting for them.

You know the plot from here.  The heroes figure out how to defeat the aliens, the plan doesn’t go exactly right, Cage loses the gift at a critical moment, and they improvise a solution.  There are predictably sweet/funny/gooey moments in between.  The only thing setting Edge apart from anything else Tom Cruise has done is characterization: at the outset, the female character is the renowned warrior, and Cruise’s character is a coward and a greenhorn.  A great start, but the film’s issues lie within that very characterization.

If this were a movie about a respected female warrior guiding a reluctant male sidekick along, that would be admirable, especially for a pre-summer blockbuster.  However, Cage is the main character, and Rita is not so much the star of her own story as she is an exotic creature whose job is to move Cage through the motions until he learns to become the hero (and thus achieve the male wish fulfillment that catalyzes virtually every single dude-centric action movie ever made).  On top of that, she’s the only female character in the movie (aside from Nance, a member of J-Squad, played by Charlotte Riley with an enormous hole in her sock).  She’s known in the military as the “Angel of Verdun” and the “Full Metal Bitch,” both gender-centric nicknames, neither of which are very complimentary.  And even her heroics at Verdun are essentially taken away from her upon the revelation that the Mimics have simply allowed the human military their biggest victories so that they’ll let their guard down in France.  Perhaps the most unsettling moment is one wherein Cage and Rita are stuck in an abandoned house, planning their next move.  Cage somehow knows how many sugars Rita takes in her coffee and that there is a dry shirt nearby in her exact size.  Rita gradually realizes that this means they’ve not only lived this day countless times, but that on at least one occasion, things became intimate, and she has no memory of it, while Cage does, and discusses it rather casually.  Maybe it’s supposed to be romantic, but it’s uncomfortable, and may be one of the more bizarre ways female characters have been stripped of agency on film this year.  That leads me to a question: if you had sex with someone, and you don’t remember it happening (not even the circumstances under which it happened, and even whether you consented), but the other person remembers everything, where does the situation fall as far as agency?

It’s a shame, because Emily Blunt is an actress who thrives at playing layered characters, and deserves more than one extreme or the other (or, in this case, as with Looper, one extreme and the other, which is also nonsense).  As a whole, Edge of Tomorrow is relatively harmless, but is full of missed opportunities, and tastes particularly sour when one considers all of the fascinating elements of the novel that go unexplored in favor of reliable formula.  O, what could have been.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014); based on the light novel All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka; written by Christopher McQuarrie; directed by Doug Liman; starring Emily Blunt and Tom Cruise.

 

 

 

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

What happened to Maggie Q?

Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol makes a few more good moves than it does bad ones. It’s funny in the right ways, well-paced, well-acted, jives with the series’ continuity (mostly), and its length makes you feel like you’re in it for the long haul with its characters.  And as I said in my Knight and Day review, Tom Cruise and I are “okay” now, so I felt like I could go in with an impartial mind (despite, as always, knowing what I was getting myself into).

The film begins with a Surprise Demise when IMF agent Hanaway (Josh Holloway, in his first film role since starring on Lost) is whacked by femme fatale Sabine Moreau (the prolific Léa Seydoux) in Budapest in the midst of recovering nuclear launch codes.  Hanaway’s supervisor and lover, Jane Carter (Paula Patton) then runs an operation to rescue IMF frontman Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) from prison.  Why he’s there, we’re not yet told, but he seems to know exactly what’s going on.

In an effort to regain the launch codes from projected terrorist Curt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), Hunt reassembles his IMF team while being pursued as a criminal by Russian intelligence.  Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), who debuted in Mission: Impossible III, returns, and along with William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), an analyst who doubles as a super-agent, joins Hunt and Carter as a four-member rogue cell determined to stop Hendricks from starting nuclear war.

The global stakes are higher than they’ve been in any M:I, and somehow things seem personal, too.  Hunt and Carter have both lost friends.  The team’s exploits take them to the beautiful Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, where Tom Cruise performs a stunt that may qualify him as clinically insane.  The film continues the traditions of the “face maker” device and the in-and-out-without-anyone-knowing-we-were-there schemes of the TV show, which didn’t truly surface in the films until the third installment.

The most egregious offense the film commits is cast abuse, which is par for the course when an action movie is given an ensemble cast.  Michael Nyqvist, one of Sweden’s great actors (who starred as Mikael Blomqvist in Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) plays the main villain, but is given less to do than his henchmen.  Josh Holloway, who won a Saturn Award for Best Actor on Television, is given a character we’re allowed to grab hold of, but is eliminated before the opening credits.  Léa Seydoux plays the most interesting villain, a French assassin with whom the film’s deuteragonist has a vendetta, but she’s disposed of halfway through the film, leaving us with the underdeveloped “main” bad guys, who, after the amazingly well-crafted, acted and edited scene on the Burj Khalifa, seem like leftovers.  None of them compare to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s villain, Owen Davian, from the third film.  Ving Rhames, the only actor to appear in every M:I film aside from Cruise, thankfully appears, but only in a cameo, as does Michelle Monaghan, who plays Hunt’s wife, Julia, a major character in film three and a plot device in this one.  Tom Wilkinson appears as the IMF Secretary, a character never seen before, who gets one short scene.  Again, why?

In addition, the continuity takes a turn for the confusing when Hunt claims “the four of us are all that’s left of the IMF.”  You can chalk it up to the entire team being disavowed because of certain spoilery events, but what happened to Laurence Fishburn’s IMF boss from M:I 3?  How about Maggie Q and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who played Hunt’s loyal team members in that film?  The movie seems to want us to remember them, going so far as using the exact same shot for Paula Patton getting out of a car that J.J. Abrams used in the previous film when Maggie Q, in an equally eye-popping getup, exited a car to perform very much the same role in the operation that Carter does here.

Some have complained to me about the overt humor and gadget absurdity, but lest we forget, the linchpin of the TV series was the sci-fi gadgetry.  When a film in the action genre tries to take itself too seriously, it begins to skirt self-parody, and Bird wisely avoids this, though it’s easily achieved by giving Simon Pegg tons of lines.

In a nice twist, the film also refers even to the first film in the series.  Somehow, Bird found the actor who played Max’s (Vanessa Redgrave) Fabio-lookalike bodyguard in the original movie, who forced Hunt to wear a black mask while meeting with his boss, an arms dealer.  Hunt meets with a different arms dealer in this one, and is confronted with the same black mask by the same bodyguard, who regards Hunt with a charmingly knowing eye.

Stumbling here and there, the film is worth its run time.  The actors don’t all get their due, and the tone is sharply changed from that of the first film, but it’s the only installment in the series to feature a fight between two important female characters (a barefoot scrap on the umpteen hundredth floor of the Burj Khalifa).  The wisest move in the film, though?  Using a hyphen instead of two colons.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol; written by André Nemec and Josh Applebaum; directed by Brad Bird; starring Tom Cruise, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, and Jeremy Renner.

Knight And Day

I’m the guy

I decided Tom Cruise and I were “okay” again after Mission: Impossible III, which shouted over its proverbial shoulder to acknowledge the true flair of the franchise while simultaneously letting Tom Cruise showcase his talents as an actor.  No matter your level of fright at his Scientology exploits, you cannot deny Cruise’s lasting appeal, natural dramatic prowess, and general likability in films.  When Valkyrie came along, despite its stellar cast and honest ambition, I wasn’t sure.  Tom Cruise as Claus von Stauffenberg?  Another Hitler thing?  Cruise has surely crossed a threshold across which we can never follow if this sort of film will be his norm from now on.  I’d rather spend time with Daniel Kaffee any day.

With Knight And Day, Cruise is allowed to be comfortable again.  Part romantic comedy, part actioner, part espionage thriller, there’s plenty of room to play around in James Mangold’s world.  Cruise stars as Roy Miller, a rogue CIA agent conveniently skilled in every situation that presents itself to him during his screen time, and Cameron Diaz appears alongside him as June Havens, an innocent car restorer who becomes involved in Miller’s absurd mission.

At the outset, the film presents itself as a rom-com and promises fun, starting with your run-of-the-mill Meet Cute and some flirty banter.  Early scenes involving Cruise and Diaz in a diner and on an airplane showcase the charm of the two leads.  Soon, however, “bad guys” attack.  Nearly every subsequent scene follows the same formula: charming build-up, satisfying wit, BOOM!  BANG!  RUN!  Cruise calmly kills off legions of armed villains under increasingly preposterous circumstances as Diaz screams, whines, looks good, and occasionally pops off a clever line.

It is, perhaps, the film’s nihilism and predictability that make it all the more charming.  From the first fight scene, during which Cruise kills the entire crew and passenger roster of an in-flight plane, the tongue-in-cheek tendencies of the film are evident.  The situation and its presentation skirt satire, and if not for Cruise and Diaz’s straight-faced performances, it might be full-blown farce.  The action scenes, as ridiculous as they are, seem fine in this world because Cruise remains the down-to-earth (if hopelessly brazen) eye around which the film’s storm spins.

Knight And Day falters when Cruise briefly goes away and we are asked to believe the convoluted espionage-thriller backstory the film previously  (and wisely) shoved aside by having Cruise sum things up with “Maybe it’s better if you don’t know” and “Those were bad guys; these are worse guys.”  Suddenly, however, we are expected to buy into an evil Hispanic maniac’s plot to capture a powerful MacGuffin (The Maltese Falcon…er, a strange battery, that is) which Miller happens to have.  The Lull Section of the film is your typical break in the adorable rom-com couple’s relationship while everything else in the story gets settled, but in this case, with long drags of silence and confusing “figure stuff out” scenes, it becomes a bore.  On the bright side, the film has a nice supporting cast, including Paul Dano and Viola Davis.  Maggie Grace even pops up a few times as June’s little sister, April.

Not clear about what it wants to be, Knight And Day lets the viewer decide what to take away from it.  If anything, Hollywood has finally gotten its fourth-wall-obliterating, self-conscious exercise in acknowledging its own conventions out of its system.  The formulaic, CG-drenched action pieces distract from the romance, and the cute, well-played romance scenes distract from the action.  In some ways, it’s two films in one, but in the end, even if Roy Miller is crazy, as many of the film’s characters claim, even if he believes he’s superman or superagent or even that humanity was born from ancient space volcanoes, you have to admit: he makes it work, and you want to watch him.

Knight And Day (2010); written by Patrick O’Neill; directed by James Mangold; starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz and Paul Dano.