Back in February when the remake of RoboCop was due to hit cinemas, I wrote a thing about other films that saw people being brought back from the dead to become super soldiers in the fight against... well, various things. Now, all of them did at least have characters who had to endure death before being returned to active duty by means of medical science, but there is an alternate route to the front line as soldiers of resurrection: time loops.
We've seen this type of chrono-japery before in movies and TV before. The easiest example to spring to mind is, of course, Groundhog Day, where one man experienced the same day over and over again until he basically got it right. It's a great idea that has, rather fittingly, popped up again and again in various forms, both long and short. The X-Files did it, Stargate SG-1 did it, and Source Code did it.
Another place it cropped up was in the pages of Hiroshi Sakurazaka's 2004 light novel All You Need is Kill, in which an inexperienced soldier is dropped into huge battle minutes before he and everyone else is wiped out... only to wake up almost immediately at the beginning of the day, before deployment. Effectively, he is forced to get good or get dead.
Well, it's ten years after the novel's original publication and Warner Bros. are about to deploy their big screen adaptation of the novel into cinemas. Re-titled as the more generic Edge of Tomorrow, the sf actioner comes from director Doug Liman, who previously gave us action adaptations The Bourne Identity (good) and Jumper (not so good). Liman has also lined himself up a pretty decent cast, themselves no stranger to the territory of the film.
Tom Cruise (of Mission: Impossible, Oblivion and other things in which he runs) stars as Major William Cage; Emily Blunt (of Looper and The Adjustment Bureau) stars as Special Forces operative Rita Vrataski; and Bill Paxton (of Aliens, The Terminator and Predator 2) stars as General Farrell Bartolome.
In anticipation of this big release, Warner Bros. have released a new trailer for Edge of Tomorrow, showcasing a great amount of the epic action and temporal shifting in the film. Honestly, it shows rather too much of it all, rather like they're trying too hard to sell all the big stuff, all whilst still coming off like they're taking tips from the Battle Los Angeles trailer. Edge of Tomorrow looks entertaining enough. Just wish they had the confidence in their project to tantalise rather than browbeat.