Oh, yeah, don’t misunderstand me – even thinking about the inconsistencies, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a mashup of three great movies - Groundhog Day, Saving Private Ryan and Aliens.
I just read that as stubborness and anger that she’d been ‘tricked’, she thought they’d broke through to a new part of the mission and got understandably upset that they’d actually been there several times before and Cage had been lying to her.
Which would explain why Cage was acting like he didn’t know what to do, perhaps he’d learned that (for whatever reason) they weren’t able to progress any further if Rita knew they’d been there before.
Not sure about the Mimic in the trailer but as someone above suggests maybe every other time Rita had unhooked the trailer as asked but this time she forgot, which would suggest that humans and other sentients having free will (or semblance of same) can throw an unexpected spanner in the works of the resets.
And I’m with Tanbarkie and RikWriter, I’m not sure why the ‘happy ending’ ruined this movie for so many people, it was entirely in tone and content with what went before. If you really want a semi-downbeat ending then read the book:
In order to defeat the Mimics Rita forces Keiji into a battle to the death, he defeats and kills her, winning that battle but not the war
And actually a fairly creepy aspect of the book is that the Mimics project future visions into the minds of the people fighting it that humanity is destined to lose the war. Effective psyops :\
IIRC, he says they’ve tried all the others except these two in previous iterations, so you try that one while I’ll try this one, and if yours works I’ll come join you.
I think he’s lying – I think he knows perfectly well that hers will work, and his won’t, and she should unhook the trailer, but he’s pretending he doesn’t know, so as to make all nicey-nicey with her at the cabin. But as for what he says, it seems to fit.
Yeah. There’s an unfortunate tendency right now for people to lump positive, but thematically correct, endings with unearned “happy endings.” Just because everyone dies at the end of a story doesn’t mean the ending was good, any more than a hugs and puppies ending does.
[spoiler]Really, a truly jarringly happy ending to this movie would’ve involved Cruise and Blunt successfully killing the Omega without dying and returning home, celebrated as heroes and saviors. That ending could actually work for a movie that focused on the struggle between the humans and the aliens, but “Edge of Tomorrow” isn’t about the Mimics at all, not really. It’s about the personal transformation that Cage undergoes. And his character arc is not one that would properly conclude with his death, because he got past that point in his arc about half an hour into the movie. By the end of the film, we’ve moved well beyond “Cage needs to redeem himself for his early cowardice,” because he’s already proven his bravery and commitment to the mission literally thousands of times over. He’s paid his price in blood more than an army of Batmen.
Instead, the emotional and thematic throughline underpinning the final act of the film is Cage’s relationship with Rita. And, to be clear, I do not mean the romantic aspect of that relationship (which is wonderfully understated anyway). Rather I mean the way in which she has become for him, over thousands of lives, the person he can’t bear to see die permanently. This is why their scene in the car, where she tells him about watching her other comrade die over and over again, is in many ways the most important scene in the movie.
Cage the person is, of course, committed to accomplishing the mission at hand even if it demands his and Rita’s (final) deaths, but from a story perspective, his character arc demands that he find a way to break the cycle of her death as much as the cycle of the apocalypse. And that’s why the ending works. The emotional exclamation point at the end of the film is not the death of the Omega, or the celebration of the humans, but the dawning, joyous realization on Cage’s face that Rita is alive - for good.[/spoiler]
I don’t think people are complaining that the ending is too happy - at least I’m not. My complaint is that the final reset doesn’t seem to follow the internal movie logic of all the rest of them. Why did he go back further? Why is Omega already dead when he does? Those discrepancies make the ending feel like a bit of a cheat.
Well,
1) Omega is to Alpha as Omega blood is to Alpha blood: stronger.
2) Reset from Alpha blood, that Alpha is now gone; ditto for the Omega.
Simpler than that - really.
[SPOILER]
The reset is always to the day before you died.
Day 1 = beginning of movie, cruise awakes on helicopter
Day 2 = the maggot awakes
Day 3 = battle on the beach
In the initial loop - maggot dies the first time on day 3 - awakens on Day 2.
Any other deaths always take him back to beginning of day 2. (regardless of when they happen after that point - he both dies before AND after his original death moment).
The Omega battle happens on Day 2 - he dies - he then wakes up on Day 1.
.[/SPOILER]
Perfectly consistent
Maybe she knows that helicopters use either jet fuel or av gas?
I think I like Simster’s explanation for the earlier reset. I’ll need to watch it again.
I agree. That’s brilliant simster, thanks!
Fantastic movie. One of the year’s best so far.
Who’s “the maggot” here?
Don’t forget Source Code (ETA: although you did say “great” movies).
And, just to whine a bit, in addition to all the ‘gimme a break’ tropes mentioned already, I’ll add:
Of course, the Omega chooses to hide in a readily identified landmark to use as ‘central control’. After all, why would it even think of going to some nondescript, anonymous location that could never be found through a simple image?
Cruise’s char - “wake up maggot” …
[spoiler]Well yeah, it is a freakin’ alien that doesn’t know a single thing about human culture. It would have absolutely no idea as to the significance of the spot or even that it is visually distinct. It may not even spatially comprehend the universe in the same way, being a hivemind that can exist outside of spacetime, to even understand the concept of a triangle or a pyramid.
Some tropes aren’t even worth railing about from the aspect of the trope itself. Wherever aliens decide to set up, they ultimately set up at the fanciest place the production crew can afford to film. If it’s a big landmark the better, so audiences can lap it up – “WHOAA!! IT’S THERE!! I’ve been there!! SO COOL!!”[/spoiler]
That was really my point - the only reason that location was used was for that very reason.
But he wakes up on the helicopter, lands, and hears about the explosion that he caused having happened before he got there.
Can we dispense with the spoiler tags? Anyone who has read this far about a movie they haven’t seen deserves to be spoiled.
So, speaking of the aliens taking up in recognizable landmarks, I assume that cool ass dam in Germany isn’t a real place, right? Otherwise every action movie ever would have filmed there. Can anyone confirm or deny?
I agree that the “happy” ending makes it harder to reconcile the time-looping and that a different ending might have been more consistent. That’s the only minor gripe I have with the ending.
I’m with Tanbarkie in that part of the reason the movie is good is that Cage…
goes through TWO transformations: sniveling twit-> hero-> caring about Blunt. He’s trying to not only find the Omega and kill it but do it in a way where she survives. It adds a little depth to the movie when one realizes that Blunt probably went through a similar situation with her looping but wasn’t able to bring the other character mentioned (Mc-something) through with her.
From IMDB:
“The landscape and scenery from the “German Dam” are actually from Torres del Paine National Park in Chile (Patagonia). The world-famous location has had the dam added by CGI at a location close to the well known " Cerro de Aleta de Tiburon” (Shark’s Fin Mountain)."
With that said, I’ve been to a dam and lake called Emosson near the Swiss-French border that was not unlike the location in movie.
I thought that the Omega battle happened in the wee hours of Day 3. No?