'Edge of Tomorrow' Trailer: Tom Cruise Dies… and Dies and Dies and Dies
When Bill Murray repeated the same day over and over in “Groundhog Day,” he used the time to learn how to play the piano and be a better man. Give Tom Cruise the same opportunity and he trains himself to be an alien-killing one-man army.
The veteran Hollywood star, now 51, puts actors half his age to shame in this new look at “Edge of Tomorrow,” the time-jumping sci-fi thriller from Doug Liman, “the director of ‘The Bourne Identity’ and ‘Mr & Mrs. Smith’” (he also made the less explosive but still great “Swingers” and “Go”). Cruise jumps out of airplanes, crawls through the mud, gets shot, blown up and beaten up by Emily Blunt … and keeps coming back for more.
That’s because he has no choice. Cruise’s character, Lt. Col. Bill Cage, keeps living the same day over and over again, a day that ends with him being killed during the first few minutes of a brutal battle. Every time he dies, he starts back at the beginning — seemingly cursed to get smoked by a bunch of aliens with superior firepower until the end of time.
Unless he turns the situation to his advantage. The new trailer for “Edge of Tomorrow” does a lot better job of explaining the film’s actual premise than the atmospheric though rather confusing teaser released a few months ago, as we see that Cage ends up using the hours leading up to the tragic battle training with his military colleague, Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), to become the ultimate super-soldier.
After all, he’s got all the time in the world to hone his body into a one-man fighting force to be reckoned with — one who may eventually be able to turn the tide of the skirmish that claims his life, and thus break free from this nightmarish existential prison.
"Edge of Tomorrow" comes across as an action-film variation on "Looper" (2012), another recent time-traveling thriller starring Emily Blunt. And, like Rian Johnson’s brain puzzle of a film, it looks like it may manage to be both unrelentingly bleak and totally kick-ass at the same time.
Inspired by “All You Need Is Kill,” a Japanese science-fiction novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, “Edge of Tomorrow" opens on June 6.
