I’m a huge fan of Tom Cruise. In fact, I have been a huge fan of Tom Cruise since 2001, I first saw him in Vanilla Sky at the age of 10, and decided he is my favorite actor. Over the years I’ve watched most of his movies, even his debut in the 1981 film Endless Love.

Edge of Tomorrow is an excellent movie – it is creative, entertaining, fast paced, with great costume design and visual effects, and if you haven’t read the novel, it’s not easy to predict the story. In this movie, an alien specie called Mimics has invaded Europe and there is a war going on against them by the United Defense Force (UDF). The tagline of this movie is “Live, Die, Repeat”, and in the movie we follow Tom Cruise’s role Major Cage wake up and die, again and again. Unlike Minority Report or Mission Impossible series, Tom Cruise’s role didn’t try to be a hero at first: at the very beginning of this movie Cage admitted that “I’m not a soldier, I joined ROTC and studied marketing in college to avoid being in the field.” But later he was thrust onto the frontline of the battle, accidentally killed an Alpha Mimic in his first battle and trapped in a time loop, where he relive the same day again and again but kept all the previous memories, and when he was killed in a battle, he woke up to this day again. Cage chose to train with Valkyrie Rita (Emily Blunt), who had also gone through similar time loops as Cage, to devise a plan of killing Mimics through his time loops and eventually defeated the Mimics.

My friend went to see this movie with me liked it very much too, but he felt that it has a weak ending. In the movie after Cage defeated the Mimics, the time loop was reset again and this time, Cage woke up and learned that the war has already ended. During the course of his training with Rita, Cage has already developed a love interest in Rita but had to sadly watch her die as he was trying to kill the Central Mimic. In the end, Cage’s smile when seeing Rita again in the training field indicates a “guy and girl lived happily ever after” ending, and for a great war fiction like this, we sometimes feel that a tragic ending suits it better. I agreed with him at the beginning.

After I watched the movie, I was curious about the book “All You Need Is Kill” and wondered how much difference Edge of Tomorrow is from the book. However there is not much resource on the Internet about the book, so I bought it on my Kindle and finished reading it during a 13-hour flight from JFK New York to Beijing. In the original ending, Keiji (in the book, Tom Cruise’s role Cage is a Japanese new recruit named Keiji Kiriya) had to kill Rita to win the battle. He did it, and was awarded a medal for killing over 100 Mimics in a single battle (a medal UDF originally created for Rita). Keiji also became the UDF’s poster boy because they needed someone to take Rita’s empty spot for their recruiting propaganda. After reading the book’s ending, I’d much appreciate the movie’s happy ending. The book has a better ending for a great war fiction indeed, but I simply don’t want to walk out of the theater weeping.

I imagine the alien specie and fighting scenes must look even more fantastic in 3D, however my friend and I arrived very late at the theater so we only had time to watch the last normal screening.

The best thing of this movie is unarguably Tom Cruise, he did a fantastic job playing the role of a civilian turned warrior, like a Chinese proverb that says heroism is not about some specific traits but simple acts of courage under crucial events. His sometimes funny, sometimes frightened and sometimes determined character keeps you entertained and definitely makes the 113 minutes an enjoyable experience.