Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Edge of Tomorrow (PG-13)

"Steal From Groundhog.  Crib From Aliens. Repeat"

Tom Cruise stars as a cowardly Major who is thrown unwittingly unto the front line of a final assault against a time-manipulating alien menace in a overtaken Europe.  In a twist of fate (and a plot wholly borrowed from the Bill Murray classic Groundhog's Day) he finds himself waking up to the exact same day every time he dies, a time loop caused by the alien invaders which was apparently based on a Japanese novel called "All You Need Is Kill".

Soundly unoriginal yet entertaining, Edge of Tomorrow is made by professionals like writer Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), starring a talented cast headed by Cruise, Emily Blunt and Brendan Gleeson, no wonder EOT is tightly made, acted and produced (yet blandly titled) blockbuster.  However, burdened with a quite wimpy PG-13 rating, Tomorrow drags itself back again and again to the past.  Generously helping itself to the squad dynamic of James Cameron's Aliens (even plagiarizing Bill "Game Over Man" Paxton), leaves the movie's well groomed hands caught red handed in the cookie jar..  The overly macho "Metal Bitch" played by Blunt is, to put it bluntly, tiresome (even more so is the eye-rolling insistence on a romantic angle between the leads), a product of the film's need to differentiate and lean on modern tropes to distract from it's source.

The reason the original Groundhog wasn't itself repeated by other films despite it's enormous success is that the formula is so uniquely tell-tale that if you copy it you'll have no where to hide.  Hire the best screen writers and talent to mix in new xenomorphs or finally use the power-armor that was missing from SciFi classic Starship Troopers and still every critic will mention Groundhog's Day.

Shoot, Die, Rewrite.  Lure the best screen writers and talent to mix in new xenomorphs or finally use the power-armor that was missing from SciFi classic Starship Troopers and still EVERY critic will mention Groundhog's Day, even though applying it to an action film can be quite satisfying (any genre in fact it would work on, its a fantastic idea that Harold Ramis came up with), Bing!

5.5 Leave the Helmet on Tom out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)