RogerBW's Blog

2014 science fiction, dir. Doug Liman, Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt; IMDb / allmovie. Groundhog Day meets Aliens.

This is a studio film, not an auteur film: Doug Liman wasn't a first-time director, but nor had he been in charge of anything big. Tom Cruise's name was clearly what brought in the money. And that exerts a gravitational pull even if he doesn't try to take over production (as he apparently would on The Mummy a few years later): if he's not happy, he can walk, and that'll destroy the whole production, in a way that having to find a new director won't.

So I'm surprised to see that, in the transition from the light novel All You Need Is Kill, our hero has been turned from just another raw recruit (OK, he is a bit old for that) into a former ad-man who's also an arrant coward to the extent of trying to blackmail his superior officer to avoid being assigned to the front line. I think I'm meant to see the Tom Cruise Grin and think that this is a good person and all is well with the world; but it doesn't work on me, and I think instead what a nasty person this is that we're having to follow.

Of course the Groundhog Day element comes in soon enough, but we never really see him repenting of his manipulative ways; rather, he just gets better at them, at the same time as he's becoming a combat god. Meanwhile Rita Vrataski (Blunt) is brought down from badass to emotional support for the big strong man. As in The Lego Movie, the script distorts reality so that the woman who did all the work doesn't get the credit.

There's a pacing problem too: as the endless repetitions grind to a halt, things slacken off, and to try to pep them up again we get another change of conceit to remove the time-reset powers and raise the stakes because "this time it matters". It all feels forced, as are the military SF tropes quite overtly stolen from Aliens and its imitators. At the same time, the physical stakes are dropped: up to that third act break, we've had people getting realistically hurt by impacts, but now all of a sudden our hero can be smashed through a brick wall by a car, or bounced at speed off a series of hard surfaces, and end up just slightly winded.

The action is shot in a confusing style which is entirely reasonable when our man Tom is a novice to combat, but it stays that way even when he knows his way round the battlefield. This is just a missed trick: making things seem clearer to the audience, perhaps even using bullet time to make it clear how much more competent he's got, would have been a fine way of denoting progress.

All right, I got irked by the "dropships", quad-rotor transports set up to allow soldiers to fast-rope to ground level. We only ever see them getting blown out of the sky, and I found myself wondering: what was their intended use? There are helicopters which troops fast-rope down from, but they're élite troops and you do it two or three at a time for very specialised operations, not thirty-odd per aircraft all at once, and not every soldier in your army.

There are bits that do work: the visual realisation of the combat frames seems quite plausible, even if no soldier would accept a thing that shouted out "reload!" to alert the enemy when their weapon was empty. Bill Paxton elevates every scene he's in, as he always did. Blunt is good when she's given a chance to be. But if you don't intrinsically accept Tom Cruise as a Good Guy that you care about, whatever his character actually does, I don't think this film can work for you. (I realise I'm in a minority here, since Cruise has a career in film, and if most people reacted to him the way I do he wouldn't.)

As usual if you want more of my witterings you should listen to Ribbon of Memes.