Knee-jerk review: "Edge of Tomorrow"

1. Aliens meets Groundhog Day.  That's what this is.  And it's pretty awesome.
2. Director Doug Liman has a Hollywood reputation for making things up as he goes along, changing his mind, dragging his feet, creating endless headaches for the studio.  But you cannot deny that his movies are almost always top notch.  We loved Swingers and Go, Mr. and Mrs. Smith was pretty good, but his most famous is probably the instant classic The Bourne Identity, so influential and inventive that it made the James Bond franchise completely change its approach to spy thrillers.
3. Anytime you can get Bill Paxton to do what he does, we're there.
4. There are undeniable echos here of World War II, what with an invasion of France to repel invaders from Europe and a top-secret suicide spy mission far behind enemy lines.  One could argue that if you swap the aliens for Nazis and take out the time-travel gimmick, this would work very well as a 1944 war movie starring Clark Gable and Ingrid Bergman as tough soldiers who develop an unlikely romance as they hunt for an enemy base.
5. "Full Metal Bitch."  That is genius.
6. Tom Cruise is starting to get a wrinkled, middle-aged wariness that's working nicely for him.  He's not taking the cocky know-it-all roles anymore.  Now he's playing the tired seen-it-all sort.  If Top Gun 2 really happens (we're hoping not), look for Cruise to take the Tom Skeritt supporting part and let someone like Channing Tatum be the hot-shot Maverick lead.
7. We'd like a moratorium on the aliens-as-a-single-organism hive-mind twist.  We think we need a new approach to alien invader biology.
8. We wouldn't have cast saucy, rom-com/period-drama regular Emily Blunt as a hard-ass soldier, but she sells it.  (That's probably why we don't work in casting.)
9. We didn't quite catch all of it, but Paxton has a speech early on about why he hates poker games.  He wants his soldiers to believe they control their fate, as opposed to the fickle nature of luck and chance in a card game.  Cruise's journey, using time travel to learn from past mistakes and control his destiny through repetition and trial and error, perfectly illustrates that theme.
10. Apparently, some have problems with the final twist.  We see their point and maybe it is a logic cheat, but it's also the kind of turn audiences need.  
11. Fantastic last scene, by the way, right before we crash to the "Directed by Doug Liman" credit and the loud end credits music.  Cherry on the top.
12. Good stuff.

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