Tom Crusie Edge of Tomorrow

[TheHammer]

Saw it last night and aside from the copout ending it was really good. Well paced, they repeated things enough times to see them learning then moved to a new set of repeating scenes so it didn't get repetitive. Perfect mix of action, comedy & drama. And Bill Paxton, need I say more?

I enjoyed the movie, but didn't quite understand the ending myself. After Tom cruise kills the alien "brain" and absorbs its time travel mojo to "reset the day", shouldn't the alien brain been alive again at that point? Instead, its treated as though the alien brain was dead despite the fact that in the reset day no one had actually killed it.

[Civil War Man]

The ending struck me as focus-tested.
Spoiler

Since Gleeson's speech at the end just talked about a late-night explosion and the eastern forces being met with no resistance, I think that the original intended ending was that everyone dies, and the world wakes up to a state where all the aliens are dead, but they don't know why. So Cruise, Blunt, and J Squad all sacrifice themselves for a world that won't remember them for it. But that ending probably tested poorly, so they rewrote the ending so the day reset and everyone is alive again, but they had it reset to an earlier time than all the other resets so Cruise would still be an officer as a "reward" for his character growth. And the Omega is still dead after the time reset because of reasons.

[phongn]

The ending struck me as focus-tested.

It is focus-tested.

[Lost Soal]

Its bullshit.
Someone kill focus testing, please.

[Civil War Man]

The ending struck me as focus-tested.

It is focus-tested.

I am aware that all movies go through test audiences. What I meant by focus-tested was that it felt like the movie had a completely different ending planned, and the studio forced a change when the test audiences responded negatively to it. Kind of like what happened to the movie adaptation of I Am Legend.

[Replicant]

Saw it last night and aside from the copout ending it was really good. Well paced, they repeated things enough times to see them learning then moved to a new set of repeating scenes so it didn't get repetitive. Perfect mix of action, comedy & drama. And Bill Paxton, need I say more?

I enjoyed the movie, but didn't quite understand the ending myself. After Tom cruise kills the alien "brain" and absorbs its time travel mojo to "reset the day", shouldn't the alien brain been alive again at that point? Instead, its treated as though the alien brain was dead despite the fact that in the reset day no one had actually killed it.

Two things struck me as odd.

1. The Omega could reset time for the Alpha units much in the same way that Kitty Pride was resetting time by sending Bishop's consciousness back into his own body at a younger age. But it could not do that for itself?

2. If the Omega can only send Alpha's back then overkill or not why wasn't the Omega surrounded by about 30 Alpha's that made it impossible for anyone to get to the Omega. Having just one Alpha there seemed to be a very poor defense.


I have never read the book so can someone tell me. Is the enemy a sentient enemy or is the whole invasion just a variation on the alien Beserker idea?

[Spekio]

I have never read the book so can someone tell me. Is the enemy a sentient enemy or is the whole invasion just a variation on the alien Beserker idea?

In the book they are adapting terraforming robots of an advanced alien civilization that chose to terraform Earth despite being aware of intelligent life being present.

[AniThyng]

I think the omega uses the alpha to reset time for all mimics including itself, hence the emphasis on hive mind

[Civil War Man]

2. If the Omega can only send Alpha's back then overkill or not why wasn't the Omega surrounded by about 30 Alpha's that made it impossible for anyone to get to the Omega. Having just one Alpha there seemed to be a very poor defense.

The doctor character did mention that Alphas are extremely rare. I think he said it was something like 1 out of every 30 million or so. So, even if there were 6 billion total mimics, there would have only been about 200 Alphas at that ratio. There may not have been enough Alphas to have dozens protecting the Omega while still having at least one at every potential human invasion point.

[Replicant]

2. If the Omega can only send Alpha's back then overkill or not why wasn't the Omega surrounded by about 30 Alpha's that made it impossible for anyone to get to the Omega. Having just one Alpha there seemed to be a very poor defense.

The doctor character did mention that Alphas are extremely rare. I think he said it was something like 1 out of every 30 million or so. So, even if there were 6 billion total mimics, there would have only been about 200 Alphas at that ratio. There may not have been enough Alphas to have dozens protecting the Omega while still having at least one at every potential human invasion point.

Point taken, but they could have had three or four there to be safe.

[Rekkon]

I think the omega uses the alpha to reset time for all mimics including itself, hence the emphasis on hive mind

I am guessing only the Omega and Alphas (perhaps only the killed Alpha) retained memory after the reset. Otherwise all the regular mimics would have learned not to kill Cruise after the first or second loop and zerged him to get his blood and recover the power. It is a plot hole either way. Even if only the killed Alpha retained memory, it saw Cruise, so you would think it could inform its underlings to take him alive.

[AniThyng]

I think the omega uses the alpha to reset time for all mimics including itself, hence the emphasis on hive mind

I am guessing only the Omega and Alphas (perhaps only the killed Alpha) retained memory after the reset. Otherwise all the regular mimics would have learned not to kill Cruise after the first or second loop and zerged him to get his blood and recover the power. It is a plot hole either way. Even if only the killed Alpha retained memory, it saw Cruise, so you would think it could inform its underlings to take him alive.

If I am remembering the movie correctly, when Cage took the power, this also meant only he really remembered what was going on, and the Omega would only really figure out what's going on later on and still has to redo the day from scratch, but since it knows its own powers it will eventually realize something is no longer right. Or something...

[Rekkon]

The Omega has to retain memory of the reset, otherwise it would never figure out something was different. If only the Alpha remembered and communicated "hey I died, going to change the plan" back up the chain, then they would either know about Cage the first time when he killed the Alpha or they would never figure it out because that Alpha was not getting killed again. I suppose the writers could declare some extra-temporal effect that persists or accumulates with the loops. They played fast and loose with their own rules the way it was.

[Dominus Atheos]

The Omega did know Cage had the powers, since it set the trap at the dam...

[Lost Soal]

Its aware someone has its powers and sends him to where there is an alpha, but It evidently has no memory of the events so it can't change any events and probably doesn't know who specificaly has its powers.

[K. A. Pital]

It's different in the original story. Spoiler

The novel's more brutal. Also because the original script was novel-based it had the very same harsh ending for the Rita-Keiji romantic line. Keiji kills Rita Vrataski.

I found the film well-done (expected of the director), and in fact enjoyable - it is nice to have an original movie that's not a part of a franchise, I am very tired of the sequel-prequel-remake carousel and I do hate comic book movies with few exceptions (new X-men and V for Vendetta). Ending sucked, which made me wonder if they should have went for the original one instead.

I also felt that the film lost another important bit of the story, suggesting that the whole alien threat is actually a drone, something like a von Neumann probe.

[FaxModem1]

It's different in the original story. Spoiler

The novel's more brutal. Also because the original script was novel-based it had the very same harsh ending for the Rita-Keiji romantic line. Keiji kills Rita Vrataski.

I found the film well-done (expected of the director), and in fact enjoyable - it is nice to have an original movie that's not a part of a franchise, I am very tired of the sequel-prequel-remake carousel and I do hate comic book movies with few exceptions (new X-men and V for Vendetta). Ending sucked, which made me wonder if they should have went for the original one instead.

I also felt that the film lost another important bit of the story, suggesting that the whole alien threat is actually a drone, something like a von Neumann probe.

They do suggest that in the film that the Mimics are just one of many meteors, the scientist speculates that the species is hitting inhabited planets and taking them over with the waves of Mimics. Or do you mean that they weren't a Von Neumann probe in the original novel?

[K. A. Pital]

In All You Need Is Kill they were explicitly described as terraforming machines, while here the nature was left ambigious.

[Kuja]

I thought it was a fun flick, though the end was a little hokey. The mecha suits were silly, but an entertaining way to make a sci-fi sendup to D-Day.

Also, the silliness of using them despite all the drawbacks actually makes a bit of sense when you think about it- we were losing the war against the mimics when the Battle of Verdun happened and the woman wearing the prototype mecha went on a massive tear through the bad guys. Of course, the real reason this happened was because she was reliving the day hundreds of times over and not the suit's combat abilities, but since the brass doesn't know (or don't believe) that they ordered up 10,000 more of the things.

I think the best part was actually the humor. I mean, come on, you can't tell me you didn't laugh when Tom Cruise spots the woman on the beach, runs her way...and immediately gets plastered by an APC. And *BLAM* "MAGGOT!" *BLAM* "MAGGOT!" got a laugh out of me, as did "no, please, don't shoot the General again." Bill Paxton was great too.

I thought the plot had a couple creative twists on the Groundhog Day theme. First it seems like its setting Tom Cruise up to learn a lesson, be a good soldier and save his teammates...but it's not. Then it seems like it's going to twist itself and make him give up his developing relationship with Emily Blunt in a 'sacrifice everything for victory' plot...but it doesn't do that either, and the visions turn out to be a total lie. If you can get past the inherent silliness of the time-reset plot device it's not a bad flick at all, although like I said I agree that the ending was a little too sappy and felt focus-tested.

[Civil War Man]

The Omega has to retain memory of the reset, otherwise it would never figure out something was different. If only the Alpha remembered and communicated "hey I died, going to change the plan" back up the chain, then they would either know about Cage the first time when he killed the Alpha or they would never figure it out because that Alpha was not getting killed again. I suppose the writers could declare some extra-temporal effect that persists or accumulates with the loops. They played fast and loose with their own rules the way it was.

My theory is that the circumstances that caused Cruise to steal the power resulted in him being resurrected instead of the Alpha, which is why you never see it in the subsequent beach scenes. For all intents and purposes, Cruise completely replaced the now permanently dead Alpha. The Omega then eventually figured out that something was wrong when the same Alpha kept quickly and repeatedly dying over and over again, sometimes before the human attack even started. A lack of time or available Alphas meant it couldn't send another to investigate, which is why it sent the visions in order to lure Cruise to them. I figure the plan was to capture him alive and drain his blood to remove his Alpha status, either reducing the number of Alphas by one or transfusing it to a regular Mimic to turn it into a new Alpha if that's feasible.

[Rekkon]

We do not have any evidence for things permanently dying between resets, and that would kind of violate the core idea. The only difference is whether or not an individual retains memory after the reset. I suppose the Omega might not know the death details of the things to which it is connected.
"Whoops, Alpha life signs zero. Hit the reset."
"What? Dead again?"
"Ok, seriously, who keeps dying?"
"Alpha 187 said it was not him either. Did one of you idiots give the power to a human again?"
"Seems like. Alpha 38, go wait in the dam. I'll broadcast images of myself there on psychic TV and see if anyone shows up."

I noticed we did not see the Alpha on the beach again, though I chalked that up to "I died here last time; be somewhere else." I half assumed it was the same one waiting in ambush. That also raises the question of whether an Alpha that did not die retains memory of the reset or it if is just the affected unit.