"Edge of Tomorrow" Stuck in Yesterday

www.edgeoftomorrowmovie.com

In Edge of Tomorrow, a video game character's ability to reset or "respawn" is a very apparent metaphor (and intentional, according to this Hollywood Reporter interview with director Doug Liman). It occurred to me that the movie's central question could be "What if you had to keep playing a video game until you won?", which at first sounds intriguing. But on second thought, wouldn't it be more poignant and memorable a movie if it made me think about things like reincarnation, resurrection, or succeeding in life? The metaphor inside a metaphor is a bit convoluted. More interesting to me is the premise of a villain that can respawn and learn from its mistakes, sort of like the robots in The Incredibles or maybe the artificial intelligence of the xenomorph in the upcoming game Alien: Isolation.

It was Incredibles director Brad Bird who first piqued my interest in this movie when he tweeted the following:

Sure, he may be biased, being a sci-fi aficionado and having directed EoT star Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol. Then again, he is also the writer/director of some of my favorite movies, including those mentioned, The Iron Giant, and Ratatouille. That, and I was intrigued by his calling EoT "original." He made a similar pitch for Gravity, another movie that won me over and that inspired the amateur film study on this blog.

While EoT is not a sequel or a reboot, it is an adaptation of a Japanese book called All You Need Is Kill, and therefore not original in the sense of a "new idea." Bird suffered a lot of Twitter backlash on this point and so clarified two days later that he knew it was a book adaptation and simply meant "original" as "first film."

Now having seen it, I have to call "foul" on interpreting originality so loosely. As a fan of retellings, I have no complaints about recycling old ideas; however, I personally felt a little betrayed by his and critics' praise for the film as something unexpected and fresh. I did enjoy it, but I kept waiting for the originality I'd paid for, wishing I could reset my expectations. Like Tom Cruise's character in the movie, it's only on the edge of tomorrow because it's still stuck in yesterday.

To demonstrate, the following are plot points or other elements from the movie that draw from existing films (spoilers follow):

What is Creativity?

Photo credit: thelegomovie.com

My ENGL 1010 students have to complete an activity in which they read two definitions of "creativity" and discuss which one they like better. One posits that creativity is "being free to express yourself in a way that is unique to you, not having to conform to certain rules and guidelines" (qtd. in Ramage, Bean, and Johnson, The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing, Brief 6th Edition, 154). The other gives several contradictory definitions (creativity = making something yourself vs. something that's derivative is not creative) before arriving at a synthesis: "Creativity, therefore, is a process.... The less experienced tend to allow for less originality, while the more experienced demand real originality to classify something a 'creation'" (155). Students usually find the second stronger and more interesting because it provides a more nuanced definition of creativity.

All this went through my mind while watching The LEGO Movie with my family last weekend. Though full of laughs and certainly a good time, it quickly unveiled loftier ambitions than I had expected. For most moviegoers and critics, it succeeded; for me, those ambitions were a risk that didn't pan out. I was expecting the people behind Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009), which I loved, to suspend my awareness of reality through over-the-top goofiness. Instead, the movie's insistence on facing reality made its over-the-top goofiness something only my kids could truly enjoy...as if that's what it wanted. As if to say, "This kind of fun is not for you."

To illustrate my point I'll have to move into spoiler territory.