At the end, Cage woke up on the helicopter because he was sleeping on the helicopter. Because the Omega had been killed, there was no meeting with the General, therefore no transfer to the front, blackmail attempt, drugging, and waking up as a “maggot”. The helicopter was simply the last place he had been sleeping. Had he not been sleeping on the helicopter, he would have woken up after the reset in bed or wherever he had slept last.
But the Omega was only killed after he got there. Well after arriving on the helicopter.
Ok, I really liked this movie but I was surprised by the ending. I expected the ending to be much more compelling. This:
[spoiler]Right before Vrataski died from the Alpha, after she kissed Cage, I fully expected her to reveal something like, “You did good, soldier. How many loops was that for you this time? 900? 1,000 did you say? You’re getting better. When we started, it was taking you 2,000 to get to this point. I tweak you and this war more and more each time. I know from my previous loops that this is as far as I can use you. So, thanks.” And then she runs off, guns ablazing.
Meaning this whole film, all of Cage’s loops, are* a part of one single loop of hers*.
Within each of her individual loops, Cage starts and ends a loop cycle and it is his final loop that gets laid down as reality for her within any given loop of hers. His final loop each time is the only loop of his she sees.
And it would work that way, I suppose, if someone started their own loop cycle within one of yours.
A wide range of the events in the film are an evolution of the design she’s built up through loop after loop, a far grander rendition of the process we watched Cage utilize. She has learned that transfusions nullify the loop cycle and designed events to allow for Cage’s transfusion so as to lock down his final loop, all the while having lied about receiving one herself. She plays dumb and lies each time she meets Cage for the first time in each of her loops because, well, she needs it that way.
So when she kisses him, his loop cycle is already over and her individual loop is near an end, as well. The war she is fighting is beyond Cage’s (and the audience’s) comprehension. And she doesn’t want to talk about it.
[/spoiler]
That’s the ending I was expecting and would have really enjoyed.
I would say 2000 is extremely low. He probably doesn’t get even his initial battlefield conversation with Rita within 2000 iterations. By the end, I think he must have done it a billion times or more.
I liked it, the ending was fine thematically, though I agree inconsistent with what we know about the time looping mechanics. Wanting them to actually die at the end is contradictory to how the movie needed to end. A final reset was good. But it should have happened differently, somehow.
But the beginning of the movie is the weak part. He’s a big PR guy for the movement, a million people joined because of him pushing everyone to join… and NO ONE recognizes him? I guess they could all just be pretending not to… but they should have thrown something in there to allude to that. It’s just weird that they made up the deserter story for a well known PR guy that most people in the army would recognize/know about because of his public persona.
Not to mention the huge liability and unbelievable nature of even putting him in action in the suit. It was too dangerous, and even if they were expecting a cakewalk invasion, it made no sense for them to do what they did with him.
But other than the shaky beginning, I thought the rest of the movie was a blast, and was definitely the best sci-fi movie I’ve seen since… I want to say, District 9, perhaps.
The general originally wanted him to safely film propaganda in the field. It was only after he threatened the general that he was sent on a suicide mission.
I dunno, that would be hard to present in movie-format, I’m have trouble comprehending what you mean even in text (which may say a lot about me but hey)
Also I liked how both Cruise and Blunts characters were both equally heroic, and Blunt had the disadvantage of not having another ‘looper’ to talk to to figure out what was happening. Its even worse in the book where there is no ‘genius government scientist guy’ and the time-looping mechanism works somewhat differently and she figures out how to break the loop through smarts and trial and error.
I doubt it, no matter how strong-willed anyones mind would turn to mush long before that point. In the book IIRC Rita breaks out of the loop within about 300 iterations, Keiji in less than 200 (granted with Rita’s help)
That’s a good point, but does it say he’s the public face of the campaign or instead some backroom PR guru who’s put the campaign together? The higher-ups know who he is and what he’s done but not necessarily the (wo)man in the field?
And as mentioned above they weren’t expecting the invasion to be a slaughter, dangerous yes, but almost certain death is still preferable to being taken out directly and shot as a deserter. He got off reasonably lightly. Though again it was unfair to the rest of his team to be sent into battle with an incompetent coward at their backs.
He was totally untrained and assigned to a team that hated him… no one even told him how to deploy from the dropship or get his gun to fire. As he was a public figure, he couldn’t have been executed without raising a lot of awkward questions, him dying in combat ties up a lot of loose ends.
My boyfriend came up with the idea that I kind of liked. He said that he was expecting Cruise to have awakened at some point in his earlier life, with no invasion ever having happened at all. That the final safety switch for the Mimics were that if the Omega were ever somehow killed, that it would activate some failsafe (either the Omega itself or maybe something even higher in the hierarchy, whatever) where they never would have invaded the planet in the first place, and gone on to some other planet instead. This would go along with the “perfectly evolved planet conquering species” line that we got, and thought that it would have been a really neat ending. It would have been happy too, and I think more consistent with the movie logic than the ending we got.
This would also prevent any species that did defeat the Mimics from even knowing that they ever existed, so they couldn’t go out among the stars and try to hunt them down.
What say you, dopers?
Fucking brilliant.
I never got the impression that he was a public figure. I think he was more Don Draper - he came up with the campaign, but no one would know who he was.
Thats a good point. However his squadmates and command would know what really happened to him.
I like that one and it would give both Cruise and Blunts characters a chance to have a life where they were never frontline soldiers at all (as far as anyone else is aware), certainly no ‘Full Metal Bitch’ tag to have hanging around your neck.
At the start of the movie, there’s a montage of media clips giving a general outline of the invasion up to that point. Mixed in are clips of Cruise’s character on various panel shows, promoting the army’s new powered armor, and Blunt’s heroism in particular. The extent to which he was a publicly known figure isn’t clear (none of his squadmates recognize him) but he was definitely a “face” for the war effort, and not just a backroom guy.
He was known enough so that his threat to the general wasn’t without teeth.
I like it, too. Might’ve even been an improvement.
I like it too, but probably too difficult to explain to the audience. I like the one where someone else comes up to him and tells him he told them tomorrow to find him.
I just saw it last night and I thought it was the second best summer movie, close behind Winter Soldier (I haven’t seen Godzilla).
Just a couple of points (no spoiler boxes):
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when they finally make it off the beach, Cage says that they’ve tried every car except two; he tells Rita to go for the one with the trailer (or whatever the British call it), and tells her to make sure she unhooks it. The mimic caught up to them by jumping on the trailer.
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when they make it to the farm house, from the cutting/transition, it’s clear that this isn’t their first time to the farm house, in fact, there is a scene where he tells her that she told him her middle name is Peyton.
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Cage was clearly the marketing/PR face of the war effort as shown in the montage during the opening title sequence; the world was stunned at how quickly Europe fell, and then Japan (I’ll assume Asia as well)
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that being said, I agree with the events of Cage’s shanghai/enlistment; he was called a coward when he left base (after frustration) and realized that the mimics would take over London the next day, while the General and the FOB thought it was going to be a cakewalk.
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Cage’s cowardly actions at the very least put him forth for a court martial, to put him on the absolute front of the front line, with the ne’er do well J Squad, was just as good as putting him in front of a firing line, but less questions and scrutiny for the General; also Cage’s exosuit had minimum ordinance and wasn’t as advanced as Rita’s; he definitely couldn’t count on J Squad to help him out
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No offense to the idea of Cage’s loop being part of the Rita’s loop, but that wouldn’t have made any sense, maybe, but it would be too difficult to show in a movie and may cheapen the entire experience of Cage’s loops
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If Cage didn’t loop back at the end, that would’ve been a terrible ending. I like the idea of the Mimic never attacking at all, though, for an ending; I look at the ending/time looping power as thus: when an Alpha dies, the fluid or whatever causes the time travel goes back to the Omega, who then resets time and coordinates and makes adjustments to the battle plan; in Cage’s case, since he has his own mind, he just goes back to when he wakes up. When an Omega dies, there is no mind for the time travel components to go back to, so it’s erased from the time line (or whenever it used it last, e.g. the battle at the beach where it probably lost and reset time so that it could win and create an all-in ambush for the UDF).
That’s a brilliant and logically consistent idea.
Maybe the film studio was concerned that it France not being obliterated might have been seen as too much of a downer ending for British audiences 
I like the spoilered version of the ending.
Just saw this on Blu-ray and enjoyed it very much. Cruise did a good job portraying the snivelling coward in the begining. It was also cool to see Paxton playing a real he-man soldier instead of a whiner. And Brendan Gleeson as a general.