The stories I’m drawn to and appreciate the most have changed over time. Used to be, it didn’t particularly matter to me how thought out a movie or book was. Things could progress logically and organically, or they could be borderline nonsensical, and it didn’t make much difference for me so long as something really cool was happening. The more I write though, the more I come to appreciate a strong vision, and intentionality in the execution of that vision. Sometimes throwing paint at the canvas to see what sticks does work out, as in the case of movies like ‘Apocalypse Now’ or basically any French New Wave film. The good ones, that is. But some stories just can’t withstand a seat-of-your-pants approach. They have to exist as a cohesive whole in somebody’s mind before you begin just to have a chance of coming out fully formed, much less impactful and interesting. It’s for that reason that every time I watch ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ I like it a little bit more. Besides having cool aliens, great effects, an excellent concept, and a cast full of stars to boot, the execution of the story is so precise that it blows me away every time. It’s so easy to blunder into plot holes and continuity errors when writing a concept like time travel (trust me, I’ve tried), and of course the audience who enjoys a story like that is also the worst possible audience for it: Nerds.

As a nerd myself, nitpicking the hell out of movies is a great pastime, and time travel is really easy to pick at. Often I find myself asking, ‘If he knew X would happen already, why wouldn’t he just do Y?’ or ‘Just go back in time again, you dummy,’ but ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ beats me to the punch every time. If you haven’t seen this movie, first of all you really should, but the gist is this: a species of time warping aliens have invaded Earth, and when hapless Major Cage is put on the front lines against his will after trying to blackmail his way out of combat, he absorbs the aliens’ power to loop time over the last twenty four hours. Cage is deployed over and over again to the final battle to stop the aliens from expanding beyond Europe. Every time he inevitably gets killed, he resets to the day before the invasion with all his memories intact. The movie is based on a Manga of the same concept called ‘All You Need is Kill.’ What I love about it is how the writers weren’t afraid to ask those questions I always do when watching time travel movies. The story is defined by the simple power of ‘why not?’ Why not have our main character fight this battle over and over again until he figures out how to win? Well, let’s just make it too damn hard no matter how many times he tries. So then, why not have him seek out the most decorated soldier on the battlefield to gain an edge instead? There’s no good reason not to. So he does so, teams up with infamous ‘Angel of Verdun’ Rita Vrataski, and finds out that she too once got stuck in a time loop at Verdun, earning her the nickname after she killed thousands of aliens in a single day. Whenever the story asks ‘why not’ the plot thickens, and things just keep getting better. There are so many downright stupid main characters in stories like this that it’s refreshing to see someone making decisions like Cage does.

The writers aren’t afraid to make the aliens as powerful as they should be either. I mean they can time travel. Why not make the aliens pretty much unstoppable? When Cage trains with Rita for weeks worth of loops to try to overcome the impossibly strong aliens, you’re forced to wonder what he’ll do next. Why not train forever until he too is unstoppable? The answer once again thickens the plot. He learns that the aliens will eventually figure out who is using their loop against them and try to kick him out of it. To stop this from happening before it’s too late, he’ll need to find the source of their power, the Omega alien, and destroy it. By doing that, he’ll break the loop and wipe out the aliens in the process, and the endgame is made clear.

The progression feels very organic, and all along Cage is using his foreknowledge of events to full effect. He pulls no punches at all. To get the group of soldiers he’s deployed with, J Squad, on his side, he covers up their illicit poker game before their Sergeant can see it. When he needs to impress Rita to convince her that he too is stuck in a time loop just as she was once, he uses what she’s told him about herself in previous loops to hurry her along into trusting him. When two members of J Squad catch Cage after he escapes out from under their noses, he beats them up with his eyes closed to convince them to go away. When he gets to a point where he and Rita can go no further without one of them dying, he chooses not to involve her on the next loop and goes it alone. And of course it only makes sense that the aliens would use this power in exactly the same way he does. Cage finds out just how crafty they are when it turns out the visions he’s been using to find the Omega are a trap. They want to lure him somewhere, bleed him dry, and rob him of the power to loop time.

The only problem left is the question of stakes. How can the stakes be of any consequence when time will just loop over and over? Again the writers are forced to ask, ‘why not just keep going forever until the good guys inevitably succeed?’ When Cage and Rita get caught stealing a device that will help them locate the Omega, the question is answered. Cage is given a blood transfusion and loses his ability to loop time. Now there’s only one more chance to defeat the aliens and the stakes are higher than ever because you as the viewer have seen them tear through Earth’s defenses over and over again. Problem solved, and the story can come to a conclusion that I won’t spoil for you if you haven’t seen it.

It sounds simpler than it is laying it all out in a neat row like this. The process of asking these seemingly obvious questions is straightforward, but actually delivering on the answers correctly every time is incredibly difficult. If you miss something somewhere along the line, then it becomes a nightmare to trace the steps back to the problem and solve it. Every ‘why not just do X?’ has to have a robust, logical answer of ‘because Y is standing in the way.’ Not only that, but it has to be in character too. One mistake can completely derail everything and then it all has to be rewritten. Developing characters when almost every one of them never ages more than a day is a monumental task too, but the writers did it well enough to make me care about them even though they were forced to break a cardinal rule of character development by preventing anyone from spending much time together. There’s so much going into just most basic series of events to make the movie work that I didn’t even get to cover the amazing alien design, or the sci-fi technology like the exo suits used to fight the aliens. ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ is such an impressive movie because it just should not work in so many ways, but it pulls off anyway and with flying colors at that. It’ll be one of my favorite sci-fi movies right up until the moment I watch it enough times to finally spot a huge plot hole. There has to be one. I just can’t believe they could have pulled it off so well with such a complicated series of events. Maybe if I start it over just one more time …

Thank you for watching,

Benjamin Hawley