No, it’s in the wee hours of day #2, the same time that the united forces are preparing for the beach assault. Remember that they are already flying into Paris when Bill Paxton discovers that J Company is missing as the forces assemble that morning.
I totally agree on this point. And it was nice that they didn’t feel the need to spell this out explicitly. They let the audience figure it out, which seems to be a no-no in recent action flicks.
Thank you very much. I thought it was CGI just because it looked like a really improbably place for a huge dam. But the real one you linked to, Emosson, looks just as improbably. Very cool.
It depends whether the aliens are on Mimic Standard Time or what. You could argue that the day for them begins at dawn and the Omega was killed just before.
I’ll have to go re-watch - but I thought the news of the explosion and aliens dieing happened at the beginning of day 2 - as it should have (on the tarmac with J company, etc) - he went from the helicopter, straight to visit blunt - skipping the visit with the general, etc.
Otherwise - its all very timey-wimey - did we hear news of the explosion or just that the aliens were dieing?
Slight correction…
[SPOILER]When Cruise is talking to the General, he says he would prefer not to be filming “on that beach tomorrow”.
So…
Day 1 = beginning of movie, cruise awakes on helicopter, he gets tasered in the generals office and wakes up as a maggot. (I guess we just assume that tasers knock people out. This is the future, so maybe future tasers do that.)
Day 2 = early morning battle on the beach. He dies first time and keeps getting sent back to Day 1.[/SPOILER]
I’ve thought too much about this…
[SPOILER]
My thinking is that when he dies the first time, his reset point is 24 hours before that. When he was on the helicopter, he was sleeping so it must have been an early flight, say 5am takeoff. He lands and meets the general at 7, tasered at 7:15, wakes up as a maggot at 8. The invasion was early morning so he dies the first time at, say 7:45, so his reset point is always while he was asleep from the taser. My time might be off, but taser to first death should have been close to 24 hours.
When they kill the Omega, they said they had to destroy it before the invasion in three hours, so they leave at, say, 4:30, kill it at 6am. Cruise had lost the time travel power so he was out of his normal “maggot loop.” The Omega had the power back so it set time back 24 hours as it died. Cruise then goes back 24 hours to when he was asleep in the helicopter.
It doesn’t matter that the time reset is 24 hours, but it fits both cases. I don’t know why aliens would use 24 hours, but filmmakers would. It’s kind of a gimmick, they set him up as being asleep at both times because going back in time to when he was in the middle of doing something would be difficult. I’m ok with that gimmick, I just realized that’s why he was asleep in the helicopter and why he was tasered, so he could be unconscious both times to time travel back to them.
Another thing I just figured out…
I was puzzled about why the Omega was still dead. Didn’t it reset time back 24 hours as it died? Then I remembered that time is reset when an Alpha dies and the Alpha died because all the aliens did when the Omega died. The Omega apparently couldn’t control time directly, it used Alphas as it’s feelers. If a battle was going poorly, an Alpha would get killed and time would trigger back so the Omega could adjust it’s battle plan. It seems like an oversight on the Omega’s part, it could only control time if an Alpha died, but not to save it’s own life.[/SPOILER]
Saw it with my two teenage sons and we all enjoyed it. Stuff blowed up real good. Definitely worth seeing in 3D. Nice to see Hudson, er, Paxton as a sergeant (when he said he was from Kentucky and not the U.S., smartass Tom Cruise ought to have asked, “Then what’s that flag on your sleeve?”). Shaky-cam didn’t bother me. Loved the gag with the different languages on his battlesuit controls. The collapsed Eiffel Tower was cool. Great scene where J Squad realizes he knows ALL about them. Pretty good chemistry between Cruise and Emily Blunt (see her in The Young Victoria and The Adjustment Bureau if you want another fix - I like her a lot).
Agreed. I appreciate all the timeline explanation above, but it was still an eyeroll ending for us.
Yes! For the first few minutes I actually was a little puzzled (“Wait, what? Cruise is playing a jerk on purpose?”)
I liked Knight and Day, too. It’s better if you imagine that Cruise is playing his Mission: Impossible character on a psychotic break.
“My advice for dealing with temporal paradoxes? Don’t even try.” - Capt. Kathryn Janeway, USS Voyager
Yeah, that’s what I thought. I didn’t buy that they’d give the soldiers a respite after crashing to make attack plans, though, given the proximity of the Omega. I think the Mimics would relentlessly swarm them until they were all dead.
It looked a lot like the dams in The Boys from Brazil and GoldenEye. Big, sheer and dramatic.
Nice analogy. Something like that was probably said in the first Hollywood pitch meeting!
One thing I missed was why did the General have such a hard-on for getting Cage on the front lines where surely he would die? Before the blackmail attempt, even?
He was a PR guy, and the general thought he could do good work there and build public support for the war. But when Cruise pushed back, that got the general’s Irish, er, dander up. Generals do not like hotshot junior staff officers arguing about their orders.
Saw it on father’s day - it might not have been my first choice, but hey daddy’s day, daddy’s choice. And I thought it was in fact awesome. I had some questions about the end - but overall I was very pleased.
Then why was the General being such a dick about it? Seemed like he was trying to teach Cruise a lesson, or give him payback for something.
I remember early in the conversation the General saying Cruise had done a good job of convincing Americans (or the world?) of the necessity of the final push, but that a lot of men would die in the battle. I don’t know if it was left up to interpretation or I just wasn’t connecting the dots (I watched at one of those restaurant theaters and was distracted by the waiter at the time).
Because at that point he felt Cruise’s character was clearly a coward and had no respect for him and was disgusted by him.
I saw it last weekend with my friends, and I was disappointed in the ending too, I felt the fade to black would have been a wonderful way to end it.
Not my friend. She was also disappointed in it, but she said she was expecting a reporter or someone to come running up to Cage and say, “Tomorrow, you tell me to come talk to you today when you land.” and have the movie fade out.
Not just a coward, but someone who’s job was to convince other people to put themselves in front of a danger Cruise himself wasn’t willing to face.
Seems like a bit of a flaw to me, then. Army PR expert does an excellent job at what he was tasked with. As a result, the brass effectively give him a battle field death sentence, with the bonus of putting the lives of other soldiers in jeopardy.
You’re missing the middle step. The general doesn’t immediately shanghai Cage into frontline duty. He initially assigns Cage to cover the invasion as the military’s PR flack - in other words, to do exactly what Cage had already been doing for months (years?), albeit this time in a more dangerous environment. The general even makes a point of noting that Cage will be well protected at all times. During this initial conversation, although the general doesn’t exactly ooze respect for Cage, he doesn’t openly disrespect him either.
It’s not until Cruise refuses the assignment that the general’s mood starts to darken. Up until this point, the general basically thinks of Cage as an empty suit who, while perhaps unworthy of the uniform he wears (since he’s never sniffed combat in his life), nonetheless serves an important purpose for the war effort. But then Cage starts trying to squirm his way OUT of the assignment, which, again, the general has put effort into making as safe as possible. And then Cage goes as far as to try to *blackmail *the general. In doing so, Cage establishes himself as worse than an empty suit - he’s an amoral, dangerous coward. And even then, it’s only when Cage goes even further and makes a run for it that the general decides to throw him to the wolves.
Saw it last night and really enjoyed it.
I am with Pashnish though, that I didn’t buy Cage’s Shanghai. To me it just seem a poorly executed macguffin to get an initially cowardly character into the timeloop. I kept expecting a loop to reveal some backroom politicking to explain it. Why in the world would you send your public face into a battle zone at all, no matter how protected.
The slightly bigger niggle for me, is on the first loop, if you were in J squad or the Sgt, why the hell would you want an apparent incompetent deserter anywhere near you in a battlezone? IS the UDF run on WW@ Russian lines - you will fight or we will shoot you?
Those couple of things aside, I still enjoyed the movie, and the ending didn’t bother me personally.
They were sending him to the front because they weren’t expecting a complete slaughter. There were expected to go in and kick ass. Of course you’d want that on film and why not have your best guy do it?
Cage got off lucky being sent to the front. After the stunt he pulled he could have been shot for being a deserter.
I thought the ending was fine but if you wanted a ‘punch in the gut’ ending and/or room for a sequel that would be a good way to do it!
That part bothered me as well, there’s no way the members of J-Squad would want an obvious hazard like Cruise in their team, at the very least someone would take him aside and give him a quick run-down of the weapon-systems and how to use them, otherwise you’re asking for an accidental burst of rifle-fire in the back (or even all around the inside of the transport!).
I wonder can I squash in extra run-on word into that paragraph…
Though it was really neat to see him go from complete newbie to ninja-master over the course of the film. 
I thought he couldn’t even fire his gun – he couldn’t figure out how to take the safety off. And no one was about to show him how. Meaning he was going into battle not only without training but without even the most basic means of fighting back. Meaning the major might as well have dropped him over a cliff. Cold!
Right, but that’s not just cold, it’s also incredibly dangerous to the general’s own side, because you’ve got an untrained and unmotivated guy running around behind your lines in power armor.
I also thought that whole plot was so blatantly ridiculous that I was sure we’d find out later that there was some time-looping reason which let the brass know that they had to get this weasely PR flack onto the front lines.
Sure, but with all his fumbling through the menu systems he might have knocked the safety off and/or triggered some of the other weapons by accident. Also as MaxTheVool says the power-armour is weapon-system in itself.
Actually as someone else above stated the General and everyone else thought the invasion was going to be a cake-walk, or at least not a slaughter, perhaps he thought all that was going to happen was that Cruise’s character was going to get a damn good scare and busted down to the ranks, which again would be a light punishment given what he did.
When I heard that Cruise was playing the main character in the movie I did wonder how they were going to handle that issue, in the book the main character is a new recruit in his late teens/early twenties. I thought they did it in a pretty interesting and fun manner actually, and Cruises character was a good one, from cowardly zero to genuine hero. Most heros only have to die once, he died again and again and again…and when he lost the power and new he wasn’t going to get a second-chance this time around he still stepped up to the plate and willingly sacrificed himself.