I know how Tom Cruise feels inEdge of Tomorrow. I’ve also memorized the movement of enemies, parsing out their behavior - “He goes to the wall three times and then on the fourth iteration he only goes to the middle of the room and throws a fireball” - and also committed irritated suicide when I blew the pattern, giving myself the chance to do it all over again.
Edge of Tomorrow is technically an adaptation of a novel (All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakaruzaka), but it’s also the first great video game movie. It isn’t that Edge of Tomorrow apes the aesthetics or look of a video game so much as it perfectly, completely captures the feeling of playing one. But it’s also more than that; Edge of Tomorrowis surprisingly funny, impressively smart and absolutely winning on every level.
Cruise plays a shallow ad exec who gets drafted when aliens invade Earth. Their beachhead is Europe, and they’ve been absolutely unstoppable because they seem to foresee every move made by Earth’s defenders - so much so that the military has taken to calling the aliens ‘mimics.’ Cruise’s William Cage doesn’t fight these baddies, though - he uses his shilling skills as a military propagandist and spokesman. That is until the day of the big counterattack, where he’s supposed to lead a film crew deep into battle to record the heroic moment when the tide turns for humanity. But Cage is a coward, and he tries to first talk and then run his way out of the situation. It’s no good, though; tased and rendered unconscious, Cage wakes up at a forward operating base, is outfitted with a mech fighting suit and dropped onto a French beach where he and every single soldier in his squad is killed.
And then he wakes up. He’s back at the forward operating base, and everything around him plays out as it did before, but no one will believe him that he’s seen all of this and that everyone will die. An so he’s strapped back in a mech suit and dropped again on that beach and once again he’s killed. But in a different way.