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Edge of Tomorrow | 2014 | PG-13 | - 2.6.5

As multi-legged aliens take over Europe, a military hero (Emily Blunt) scores a major victory against them, while a US Army PR rep (Tom Cruise) has a mission but he dies in battle. However, alien blood spilled on him triggers a time loop and he reawakens repeatedly on the morning before his death. Also with Bill Paxton and Brendan Gleeson. Directed by Doug Liman. [1:53]

SEX/NUDITY 2 - Several male soldiers appear shirtless in an exercise room and a bunkhouse; we see bare chests and a few tattoos of patterns on arms. An overweight soldier wears no clothing under his large exoskeleton suit and we see his navel and bare buttocks. In several scenes, we see an overweight soldier wearing an exoskeleton on a battlefield and his suit reveals his navel. A female soldier in a training room wears leggings and a bulletproof vest, baring her shoulders, arms, part of her lower back and part of her stomach.
 A male soldier and a female soldier kiss briefly but passionately before a combat assault. A man asks a woman if having sex can transfer time-control power and she replies no.

VIOLENCE/GORE 6 - The film involves a massive war in which soldiers die every day and revive the next morning; they use a range of high-tech weaponry that includes large rifles, lasers, grenades, bombs and powered black exoskeletons fitted with large caliber automatic rifles on their arms and backs (a female soldier also carries a machete); the war is against massive numbers of large aliens called "Mimics" that have tentacles and who control time and know what is going to happen; loud action is continuous, with repeating scenes of killings and bombings on battlefields, bodies being thrown and flames and smoke rising to fill the screen. TV news reports speak of war with an enemy and show a fireball landing on earth in a background shot, footage of soldiers in camouflage marching, smoldering cars and trucks on a sandy beach as seen from the air, bombs bursting on the ground in a long shot, and footage of soldiers wearing black exoskeletons lumbering on a beach. Several large drop ships explode in the sky of a battlefield and crash to the ground and toward the camera in flames and smoke.
 A man refuses to travel to the front lines of a European war, a general has him arrested and a soldier fires a Taser at the camera lens, from the man's point of view; the man wakes up in handcuffs, lying on a pile of duffel bags at a makeshift military base at an airport where he argues with a sergeant and is placed into a combat unit and he sees soldiers taping explosives to the front of their combat suits; one helmet features a painted skull and hundreds of soldiers wearing exo-suits march into giant drop ships, which fill the skies; the man is suited with an exoskeleton fitted with automatic rifles on the arms and back, put onto a drop ship with many other soldiers and flown to the west coast of France, where the front of the drop ship explodes (this scene repeats several times) and the soldiers drop to the ground on cables, but many catch fire and presumably die; one man catches fire on the ground where he stumbles and falls dead, another man falls face down in water and convulses as the camera cuts away to other men shooting aliens, one man does not know how to work his exoskeleton and is stuck in the heart by an alien tentacle, and then wakes up to find himself lying on duffel bags (this death scene repeats several times and sometimes he screams on awakening and once, he repeatedly shouts, "You're all doomed! You're doomed!).
 A woman slashes aliens bloodlessly with a machete and dies, eyes open, in several repeats of the scene: we see her dead from the shock of an explosion that throws her through the air to land face up, face down, and sitting against a rock in different scenes. A man watches hundreds of soldiers fire rifles at whirling, screeching and jumping drones with many silver and black legs; men fall dead, often with a large black, charred hole around the heart.
 A soldier steals a ship and flies to Paris where we see the city flooded and the Eiffel Tower lying on its side; the Louvre is flooded, as are nearby streets and soldiers in the ship fire automatic rifles at alien drones, killing dozens of them when two soldiers with bloody faces pull pins on grenades as a horde of drones jumps at them; the camera pans back to reveal a large explosion of flames and smoke that disintegrates drones and presumably kills the two men.
 In dozens of scenes hundreds of faceless drones as large as a small car whirl black and silver legs to fly and jump, emitting some sort of shock wave that kills humans. Aliens stick a tentacle into a human's chest to kill him or her in a few scenes leaving a large charred hole without blood; men and women shoot or slice up dozens of drones, which crumple in a pile that looks like metallic yarn, but does not bleed and several aliens catch fire and charge the camera, but then drop dead, smoldering. We see half a dozen aliens that are as large as a tank, with four legs and covered with dozens of tentacles on the body, neck, and head; they have reptilian faces and mouths that roar to show many teeth and heat waves; they spew blue-white fire and in one scene, a man's face burns red with staring blackened irises, then chars and ashes in close-up as he dies from a blast from an Alpha. A ships falls on top of a man wearing an exo-suit, presumably killing him, and that scene repeats a dozen times; bombs burst in the background and fires erupt into flames and smoke.
 A female soldier suffers a wound on the shoulder (we do not see it) and the camera cuts to a man taping a large bandage to her back before they find a helicopter, but alien drones immediately jump into the scene, wrecking the helicopter and a barn; an alien pushes a car through a brick wall, bricks tumbling, and a man on top of the car flies off, scraping his face and arms; he gets up and finds the woman dying on the ground, blood smeared on the helicopter windshield and she dies as he looks at her and aliens jump toward him as the camera cuts away; in a repeat of the scene, the man takes the helicopter himself after burning the barn down with aliens in it and flies to a dam, where he confronts a screeching drone and a roaring alien, who fly up at him from a wide sewer opening and he escapes by jumping into a river and drowning, but waking up on the morning before.
 As a man repeatedly wakes up at his army base after dying in a battle that keeps repeating, he begins training with his exoskeleton suit in a large training gym containing whirling mechanical replications of alien drones; a female sergeant trains him and explains that she was stuck in a time loop and to reset to the morning before, he must die; he is thrown across the room by mechanical beings several times and becomes injured half a dozen times, with a broken back and broken limbs whereupon the female soldier points a handgun at him and shoots him off-screen, each time to reset the day. A woman fires a gun at the head of a man talking to an army general and the camera cuts away to the man waking up on the previous day. A woman begins to stab a man so that his death will reset the day, but he says he no longer has control of time since having had a blood transfusion. During army physical training, troops jog, shouting, "Kill! Kill! Kill!" and they drop for pushups; one man doing pushups rolls under a passing truck and we hear he was smashed; in a repeat of the scene, we see the man roll safely between the wheels of the truck and run to another part of the army base where he meets with a female soldier and through many scenes of a beach battle they choreograph movements until they are shooting and slicing dozens of aliens. A man beats an alien drone to death in close-up with a metal bar and it crumples bloodlessly.
 A woman drives a vessel into the Louvre to break glass for an entry and a man and the woman break more glass to get into the museum, fall uninjured into a lower level and run in opposite directions to kill aliens; the man jumps into water, swims up and back onto land then distracts an alien into following him through a flooded hallway, where they swim, an alien chokes the man with a tentacle, but the man throws a set of grenades bound together toward the alien, releasing firing pins from his hand as the camera cuts away at the beginning of an enormous underwater explosion and we see the Louvre blow up.
 A man and a woman take a minivan from an abandoned RV park and drive when an alien drone jumps into the trailer the van is pulling; the man stands up through a roof opening and shoots the alien with rifles throwing the trailer and the alien back and it falls into a crumpled heap while the trailer smolders. In a car chase scene in a parking garage, a man stabs his thigh with a transponder and his irises become black and fill his eyeballs as he has visions of an alien in the Louvre; military police shooting rifles chase the car and a tall man wearing an exo-suit walks in front of the car and slams himself into it, crashing the car and killing the man and the woman driver, who revive and wake up on the day before (we see blood spatter on their faces).
 A man picks up a transponder and another man jumps as four short spikes pop up from it. In a London pub after fighting in a battle, a man sees the lights go out and hears an air raid siren; he runs outside to find the Thames river filled with alien drones that jump toward the camera (and toward him).
 During training, we see several soldiers wearing exo-suits and firing automatic rifles at metal targets in an indoor firing range (the gunfire is very loud) and as one man becomes better at defeating mechanical aliens, he also is more successful in his repeating battle, shooting and punching more whirling aliens with tentacles in each repeat.
 A soldier starts a fight with another man, who sidesteps, sending the first man crashing into a wall, unconscious. A man and a woman sidestep military police that are looking for them and the camera cuts to a scene of the soldiers chasing the man and the woman, who are in a car speeding out of a parking garage.
 Soldiers argue on a ship and one man tells another that there is a dead man in his shoes; the second man warns the other soldiers that the ship will explode and aliens will slaughter them and in a repeat of the scene his mouth has been covered with duct tape. A male general tells a PR man that Europe must eradicate the alien invaders and the PR man says he cannot stand the sight of blood. A female soldier's image in full exoskeleton weaponry and laser rifle appears on tall recruitment posters on public buildings as propaganda and we hear that she has masterminded a huge victory over aliens in Verdun. A woman tells a man that she watched a close male friend die 300 times and no longer wants to think about that man.
 Alphas ooze a dark bluish blood at times when they die from gunshots. In a few scenes, we see an alien that looks like a white rotating ball in a wide nest of blue-white tentacles pointing straight up like a crown around it (it supplies a hive mind and a power source).

LANGUAGE 5 - About 2 F-words (the second one somewhat muffled), 7 scatological terms, 10 anatomical terms, 24 mild obscenities, name-calling (crazy, liar, coward, deserter, maggot, slack-jawed, parasitic scum, slippery), stereotypical references to army generals, drill sergeants, ground soldiers, bloodthirsty extraterrestrials, heroes, PR representatives, alien monsters, Americans, the British, exclamations (shut-up), 6 religious exclamations (e.g. Oh My God, For Christ's Sake, The Lord expects us to do only one thing and that is to win).

SUBSTANCE USE - A man drinks from a mug of beer in a bar and we see beer taps at the bar and glasses of ale in front of the few other men in the establishment, a soldier asks a fellow soldier if he has been drinking because the second man does not wear a helmet in battle and the second man says no, a sergeant asks a new recruit if he is hung over in several scenes and the man says no, and a female soldier asks a male soldier sarcastically if they are going to sit by a fire in an abandoned farmhouse and open a bottle of wine.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Death, war, D-Day, high-tech weapons, female combatants, extraterrestrials, politics, danger, propaganda, teamwork, problem solving, time travel.

MESSAGE - Winning a war sometimes requires unusual tactics.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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