I’ve seen several threads about the movie, but none about this particular question – how many repeat days did Tom Cruise live in the movie? We have a bit of a baseline, at least more than with Groundhog Day, as Emily Blunt reported at least 300 days when she had the power.
I’m going to rather arbitrarily choose 5000 repeats, because Tom seemed like a rather slow learner.
FYI, I have re-christened the movie Saving Private Groundhog, as I think there were a lot of bits in the beach scenes that were tributes to the Spielberg film.
There’s two parts to that question since you specify days. Unlike Groundhog day a loop wasn’t time contrained. It started and went till death so some were longer, even multiday, than others. The other piece is how many loops he underwent. There’s some pretty clear jumps at times where he’s obviously been through something many, many times to figure out something but they aren’t all shown.
Due to the second piece I doubt you’ll ever get more than an arbitrary guess pulled square out of the butt. Just his early training could have been dozens if not a couple hundred. I don’t even want to think about how many loops it took to master and memorize the carefully choreographed footwork to avoid security in one scene.
Not only that remember the farm with the helicopter? We the audience didn’t see it, but he admitted to the female lead he had done the farm possibly hundreds of times and was never able to get them both on the heli.
There were several parts like this, where we the audience find out there were many iterations we were not privy to.
I’m going to go with a lower bound of about a million, but I think it’s much more than that. As presented it becomes easy to forget that he has to do absolutely everything perfectly from the beginning every time, and he will screw up a lot.
I call it Groundhog D-Day (or sometimes Groundhog Independence D-Day).
I vote for thousands, possibly tens of thousands or millions, or even more. A lot of the time he’s training ‘muscle memory’ - which requires much repetition, except in his case, often that repetition involves reliving the day because the small slip of tactic resulted in death.
Aside; aren’t there arguments that in Groundhog Day, the protagonist is trapped for the equivalent of thousands of years?
Actually, thinking about it, even 1000000 iterations seems high…I wouldn’t imagine more than a couple hundred attempts at the first day (and even that involves getting sloppy after resetting later in events). Every later iteration would then be more than 24 hours.
The problem with a high number of iterations (> 10k) is that Cruises character would likely go insane from the mind-numbing repetition and depression from all the failures. I don’t remember the movie giving an explanation for that.
IIRC- Apparently that’s a Buddhist thing (1000 years to enlightenment) and Ramis had said that the movie was Buddhism influenced so that’s how that got started.
Groundhog Day was a reaaaaaaaaaally long time. I cant say which was longer but he was trapped for far longer than you see in the movie. There are hints at this, He Masters languages (very hard to do as an adult) , masters the piano, the ice carving. the brief scene where he goes to the library, reads a single sentence then moves on, the implication being hes reading the books, All of them, in order, one sentence per day. Iiirc these were dropped in there as hints to the above mentioned Buddhist version of limbo or hell or something along those lines.
I think it’s easy to underestimate how good humans are at this kind of thing. Just hundreds or even tens of attempts can be enough for people to complete those ridiculous mario mods where you need split second timing for several minutes and in some parts it’s not even obvious what to do (kaizo mario?)
His challenge in the movie didn’t look like he needed to remember very many specific split-second bits, so I’m thinking hundreds or low thousands max. Also note he only needed to get to the final lair (the repeating day thing didn’t apply after that point).