The filmography of Tom Cruise has provided many visions of the future.
The gorgeous looking bleakness of Oblivion, the saturated dystopic nightmares of Minority Report, the enormous War of the Worlds invasion remake and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol's invasive run around the world have each provided futures with a wide variety of bleakness.
Here, Cruise is once again creating a future world scape and this bleak apocalypse world is not a pretty future for us.
The film opens with the standard opening of a blitz of news television broadcasts, which in this context, documents the landing of a meteor just outside Hamburg in Germany, from which an alien race called the Mimics appeared and quickly colonised continental Europe.
But after victory in Verdun, the humans are slowly fighting back, and now a planned UK/USA invasion is in the works, with Major William Cage (Cruise) plugging the war silly on BBC and CNN.
Unfortunately for him, his life as army PR is undone when he is drafted up for the invasion of France, and his first ever experience in one of his much argued supersoldier machines is in the first wave.
Sweating buckets, the unnerved Cage is reluctantly transported to an army base at Heathrow Airport, and shoved into action. But the invasion is a total botch job, and Cage is killed in action.
Except then he wakes up again, back on a pile of suitcases at Heathrow and introduced to the same army Sergeant Farrell (Bill Paxton) with the same introduction to his army squad.
He's sent back to the invasion, dies again, and then wakes up again, and then it happens again.
There are different ways to he dies, but it continues, thanks to an intriguing, if a little standard, fact that he has wound up in the system of a hive-mind organism. This is fairly Matrix-like in its plot, not least given the Mimics have a metallic eight-legged look similar in a way to the machines in the Matrix movies.
This is not a full-on Matrix-meets-Groundhog Day clone, given it lacks the humour of the latter. Granted, there are a few wry quips dotted hither and thither throughout the flick, but it's not a comedy movie.
Along the way, the hapless Cage is introduced to and teams up with legendary soldier Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), where he finds out her inspiration to the victory in Verdun was down to the exact same time loop that he has become stuck within.
As well as learning from her and the classic know-it-all disgraced scientist, he begins to up his skill level in tackling the dreaded Mimics, while finding out the way he can take them down.
But after collating skills in scenes that increasingly resemble non-playable video games - in a good way, rather than the likes of the Need for Speed movie - it turns into an impressively intimate piece at times, where we have just Cage and Rita cruising through the abandoned French countryside.
It's a nice, if underplayed, atmospheric, similar to a horror movie and complete with similar scary stuff lurking, as well as Cage's oddly-played dynamic in having essentially played this game dozens of times to this point, and coming up with the same ending he wishes he did not forsee.
The aesthetic is certainly dirtier than last year's Oblivion, such as the ugly - if effective - supersoldier armour and the abandoned French countryside, although Cruise's teeth remain as neon-white as ever.
Cruise is also delightful in this role. For once, he is not in a master of the universe role and instead does seem to be well-calibrated for the role of someone who has reluctantly and accidentally wound up knowing the secret, while the equally impressive Blunt pushes him further and further towards being that saviour.
It helps the roles are surprisingly well-written. This could have gone for the way of being an endless grind, as playing a video game for hours and hours can be, and it could have taken some of the goofiness out of the premise, but instead, there's almost a neat and tranquil attitude, which sees us also toy with ideas beyond the initial spectrum.
This is not a flawless piece. It is a fair criticism that the film is not an original piece, with pieces incorporated from all over the place in the sci-fi spectrum, and even having the air of a World War 2 piece.
Also weak is the ending to the film. The anticipated final showdown is superbly handled, but after that, the final 2 scenes is the film's first major mis-step in pacing. One can't help but feel they needed more elaboration.
This mis-step aside, there is much to admire with this movie. It may not be the most original piece of film making or writing, but it plays everything well, and it does well to keep up a vision that works nicely, making it possibly one of Cruise's best works in a long while.
4/5
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