Jeremy’s Tophunder №79: Edge of Tomorrow

7 min readMay 30, 2020

Edge of Tomorrow was released in 2014, based on a Japanese light novel called All You Need Is Kill. That was also the original name of the movie, but was changed during filming, partly because the studio didn’t want “kill” in the title, but also because director Doug Liman didn’t feel like the title reflected the tone he was going for with the movie. They went with “Edge of Tomorrow” over Liman’s preference, “Live Die Repeat,” which they ended up using as a tag-line instead.

A lot of the promotional materials for the movie, though, featured “Live Die Repeat” more prominently than the actual title, to the point where the Blu-Ray packaging and thumbnail images on streaming websites barely display the title at all, and most digital retailers actually list the movie as “Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow.”

And I don’t like it.

Maybe the biggest reason I loved this movie so much the first time I saw it was because I didn’t know the time loop was coming. I really didn’t know anything about the movie other than that it was a Tom Cruise science fiction movie about an alien invasion. For a minute I probably even confused it with Oblivion, another Tom Cruise science fiction movie that came out the year before that I never bothered to see. When time started looping, the movie went from a good (but ultimately forgettable) action movie to one of the best action movies of the decade.

I love movies that mess with time. By my count, there are seven movies in my Tophunder that specifically manipulate time or present alternate timelines, and a few others that don’t necessarily talk about time, but they present alternate branches of reality. And there are probably five or ten other time-loop/time-travel movies that were included in earlier drafts in the list, but just ended up on the wrong side of the cut.

Edge of Tomorrow handles their loop incredibly well. Terence Maynard (unfortunately credited simply as “cruel sergeant”) plays an incredibly important role for an unnamed character, serving as the de facto cue for each of the re-sets. They also use a nice to touch to insert some humor into Tom Cruise’s repeated deaths — Tom Cruise encouraged the writers and stunt teams to draw inspiration from Road Runner cartoons, comparing himself (and his character) to Wile E. Coyote and remarking in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “it’s fun coming up with new ways to kill yourself.”

This comedic essence filters through a decent chunk of the movie — it really seems like they took advantage of every opportunity to insert a laugh into a movie about Tom Cruise battling an alien invasion, which keeps the plot moving with entertaining energy. There’s almost certainly another version of this movie on the cutting room the floor where the repeated deaths start to feel monotonous and forced. A lot of credit goes to Liman, who was able to inject humor in similar ways to action movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and writer Christopher McQuarrie, who has emerged as Cruise’s preferred writer and sometimes director to work with (in addition to Edge of Tomorrow, the two have paired for Valkyrie, both Jack Reacher movies, the two most recent Mission: Impossible movies, the remake of The Mummy, and the upcoming Mission Impossible 7 and the Top Gun sequel).

Speaking of McQuarrie, he took over a rather complicated script development, and did it rather late in the process. The movie started as a spec script based on the source material, which is rather uncommon. Most often, movies like this get made based on a pitch from a director or producing team, encouraging a studio to purchase the rights. The first writer, a guy named Dante Harper, took eight months to write the script with no guarantee that it would would ever come to fruition, or even that he would get paid for his work.

A total of five different scripts (from seven different writers) were written before McQuarrie was hired to re-write the final draft, just eight weeks before filming started. The movie didn’t even have an ending written and finalized when filming started, leaving Liman and McQuarrie to come up with one on the fly during principal photography.

Filming didn’t exactly go smoothly either. On the second day, Liman demanded a complete re-shoot of everything from Day 1, which is, uh, not usually a good sign. The scenes involving the beach invasion were originally scheduled to be shot over the course of two weeks. They ended up lasting almost three months. In order to get everything done on schedule, a second crew filmed 20 additional days on weekends. Another sticking point was that the movie is supposed to all take place over the course of a single day, so any change in weather is kind of a problem. They eventually had to re-work the script to include scenes in the rain, because they couldn’t afford to not be shooting when it rained with how behind they already were.

If there’s one trend in movies over the last decade that I enjoy to an unreasonable degree, it’s Emily Blunt: Action Bitch. At the start of her career, it seemed like she was a really good actor who would find success in serious roles, but with enough funny chops to find her way into some half-decent romantic comedies, and maybe she’d put it all together in the way that Julia Roberts or Reese Witherspoon did. Then her career seemingly took a hard left and put together a run that included Looper, Edge of Tomorrow, Sicario, and A Quiet Place between 2012 and 2018. If you want to, you could even include 2011’s The Adjustment Bureau and 2016’s The Hunstman: Winter’s War (which have action elements, but Blunt’s character isn’t super involved in them). Among female actors under 40, Blunt is perhaps the one with the greatest range. She’s the only one I would trust equally to pull off an action-adventure performance on par with what Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver submitted in the 80s, but also an in-depth character study reminiscent of something Cate Blanchette or Kate Winslett would do. If you’re trying to convince me to go see a movie that I know nothing about, and all you’re doing is telling me who’s in it, Emily Blunt is pretty close to the top of the list of names to mention.

Edge of Tomorrow is just a movie that checks a lot of boxes for me. I love Tom Cruise. I love Emily Blunt. I didn’t even have time to mention the late, great Bill Paxton, but he’s delightfully great in a small-ish role here. McQuarrie is quickly rising in my list of favorite writers and directors, and while Doug Liman has made a few stinkers, he’s made plenty of solid movies too. It has time loops, it has creepy looking aliens, and it really seems like everybody took the project seriously and did what they could to assemble a complicated story with a lot of moving pieces into a worthwhile movie. While it’s a little upsetting that the movie has been effectively been re-titled in a way that is very on-the-nose to the movie’s “twist,” I suppose it doesn’t really matter in a time where people want to know what a movie is about before agreeing to see it. But I didn’t know what it was about, and I was pleasantly surprised. And on top of that, it’s a very re-watchable movie as well. Even when I know what’s coming, it’s still a blast to watch, and it’s my 79th-favorite movie of all time.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring