edge of tomorrow, or live die repeat, or edge of tomorrow
in which tom makes a masterpiece by accident
Gasp! A rift in the continuum!
This isn’t Rogue Nation. This isn’t even Mission: Impossible!
Quite right. I went and added a movie to the series. You can’t stop me. I am the God of this domain.
Okay, before we get to the whole justification bit, I have to address this: the home release cover for this movie. It has haunted me for years.
So, the headline point is obviously the panicked semi-change to the title that was haphazardly grafted onto the film after its theatrical release underperformed. Live Die Repeat is a punchier and more legible title than the more abstract original one, so the logic goes. It’s sensible logic, but it’s also wrong. That new title fucking sucks.
It’s not the thing that bothers me most, though. That would be how the cover works in the original title. In a move of ungodly sweatiness, it is thrown at the bottom in a big word mulch: EDGEOFTOMORROW. It very much appears, with the “Cruise/Blunt” bit preceding, that this EDGEOFTOMORROW is the third star of the movie. An unsuspecting observer might wonder who this fellow is. They might wonder if Bill Paxton, probably the third lead of the movie, had chosen to change his name to Bill Edgeoftomorrow.
Awful. Just awful. And don’t think I’m leaving this bit without pointing out how the BBFC logo is just hanging around there in the middle. Fuck outta here with that.
Welcome to Edge of Tomorrow, otherwise known as Live Die Repeat, alternatively known as Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow, and occasionally known as Cruise/Blunt/Edgeoftomorrow.
Why are we covering Edge of Tomorrow in a Mission: Impossible series?
Well, for one, it’s not a Mission: Impossible series. We have the Tops Gun too, and that’s what you call “an out”. Back in the days of yonder, I kicked about doing a more extended retrospective of Cruise’s career alternating between Mission movies, before realising that would have been brutally overambitious and bad. Possible in-between instalments included Collateral (one of the last gasps of top tier dramatic Cruise) and The Mummy (his biggest failure of this century, hilarious). Those would have been fun.
We could have talked about this, for instance.
Remember what you’re missing.
The one I really wanted to talk about, though, was Edge of Tomorrow. Cards on the table - I think it’s a near-masterpiece and I adore it, so that was motivation. It wasn’t just that, though. Edge of Tomorrow represents an inflection point for Cruise’s career in a lot of ways. It feels like the end of an era for him in some ways, and the beginning of another one. It’s the kind of thing he’d basically never do again, but it’s also the starting point for a lot of ideas and approaches that would define the following and current era of Cruise.
You may be wondering about the eras of Cruise as I have defined them. That’s okay. Here’s a route map.
Origins Era (1981-1986, Endless Love to Top Gun)
Imperial Era (1986-1996, Top Gun to Mission: Impossible)
Producer Era (1996-2005, Mission: Impossible to War of the Worlds)
Flop Era (2006-2011, Mission: Impossible III to Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol)
Transition Era (2011-2017, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol to American Made)
Late Imperial Franchise Era (2018-present, Mission: Impossible - Fallout onwards)
I’m not going to make any Tom Cruise Eras Tour jokes. It feels like low-hanging fruit.
As you can see, Edge of Tomorrow takes place in the middle of Transition Era, an overall odd spot for Cruise’s career that was defined by a general uncertainty about what his whole deal in Hollywood was, now that he had retreated, more or less, from public life. Transition Era contains two highly successful Mission movies and a relatively cheap hit in Jack Reacher, but also a string of films that all underperformed in one way or another at the box office - the nadir being the ludicrously overbudgeted The Mummy.
By this point, Cruise had virtually abandoned mid-budget filmmaking entirely - that’s why the $60 million Jack Reacher feels like Skinamarink for him. Almost everything he made was now a huge action blockbuster sold on his name, which meant the bar for success was higher than it had ever been, and even moderate performers like Oblivion could seem like a failure.
(There is one exception to this whole point, actually, which is American Made, the 2017 film that reunited Cruise with Edge director Doug Liman. American Made, a pretty fun movie, is mostly notable for its baffling anachronism. It’s a mid-budget original R-rated film for adults that uses Cruise like a regular movie star and treats him like he’s 35. It honestly feels as if it fell through a time portal from a cable channel circa-1997.)
So it was with Edge of Tomorrow, a movie that grossed nearly $370 million and was considered not a success. There is a reason, sadly, why Cruise stopped doing these things - why Late Imperial Era is defined entirely by his safe franchise picks. We covered a lot of the decline of the movie star when discussing the Rock, and it turned out even Tom Cruise wasn’t immune to the decreasing importance of big names in Hollywood.
The non-franchise movies of this era, from American Made to Oblivion to The Mummy to this one, were all pretty much sold purely on the strength of Cruise’s name. In 1987, 1995 or even 2004, that’d be fine and dandy, but in the MCU-crazy 2010s, it simply wasn’t enough. It’s certainly true that Cruise’s star power was pretty much as bright as you could get - the Mission: Impossible movies were unequivocally sold as Tom Cruise joints also, and each of the recent three have been mega-hits. Still, though, Mission is a franchise, and Ethan Hunt is a character, that people know. Audiences wanted to see Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in the same way they wanted to see Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man. The two were no longer separable - the movie star was no longer a plug-and-play situation.
So, soon enough, Tom made the reasonable calculation, and stopped making movies like these ones. As we’ll cover in more depth later, his present state of that of a total franchise man who knows his commercial limits. And, you know, it makes sense. It has been quite profitable for the fella.
But it’s also a bummer. Hollywood lost a little something when Tommy C made that choice, and if you want proof, then the pudding is Edge of Tomorrow.
Why am I writing about it? Well, it’s the dying embers of Cruise’s original movie star wattage, a showcase of everything he was capable of when he was thrown a new script and a new character. It’s a further step towards his present state of a tight rotation of collaborators. It’s where he figures out how to channel, and subvert, his natural charisma now he was no longer, by any conceivable metric, a young buck.
It’s a goddamn bastard masterpiece.
Crank up the John Newman, because we are heading to 2014.
When looking for particularly pivotal years for film in the 21st century, three obvious candidates offer themselves.
The first is 2008, when The Dark Knight changed just about everything, and where the MCU got its start.
The second is 2012, where The Avengers set the tone for blockbuster filmmaking for better or for worse, and when the landmark cinematic achievement that is The Hobbit trilogy began.
(Joking! Joking.)
The third is 2020, because, you know, all of that.
Anyway. Obvious picks. Probably correct.
For the sake of argument, though, let’s talk 2014. Not a year where everything changed, per se, but where quite a few important things did happen, and I’m not just talking the debut of the best Doctor Who there has ever been.
#capaldiforlife
Looking at the big films of 2014, you see the usual smattering of superhero blockbusters, sequels and animated movies that are ubiquitous box office features by this point. The difference, I think, is that these blockbusters are unusually good, and therefore unusually influential. Thirty-one films made over $100 million in the US (including - by a few pennies - Edge) and there are some treats among them.
The two MCU offerings were Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy, widely regarded as among the best the franchise has done, and both with their own massive pop cultural impact. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Interstellar are intelligent, epic sci-fi stories that were also massive mainstream hits. The LEGO Movie’s influence is something I could threaten to write a book about. 22 Jump Street was a huge hit and a satisfying sequel. Say what you like about Godzilla, but it started one of the only successful post-Avengers cinematic universes. Obviously Frozen was a thing. I mean, shit, Gone Girl made over $350 million worldwide.
Sure, there was a lot of bullshit at the box office in 2014 - the two biggest global grossers were Transformers: Age of Extinction and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, blech - but audiences were showing up for a varied selection of high-quality movies, many of which have put down pretty deep roots in our present pop culture. Looking at the years either side of 2014, it looks all the more impressive. This was a year where the new-new model of Hollywood filmmaking, where huge tentpole franchises came first and everything trickled down from there, was in full swing, and where it worked.
Against all of that, what’s an old-fashioned movie star to do?
Edge of Tomorrow opened third at the box office behind the crazy popular The Fault in Our Stars (yeah, it was 2014 all right) and Maleficent. 22 Jump Street and How To Train Your Dragon 2 opened the next week, firmly cooking its chances at success. The same box office weekend that inspired Channing Tatum’s legendary email* cooked Edge of Tomorrow’s chance at summer success.
*Referenced in the Spider-Man: Homecoming newsletter, which explains the context of the 2014 Sony hack and why Channing Tatum chose to use the phrase “WE GOT CATE BLANCHETT WIT DIS BOX OFFICE BITCHES” in an internal email. That’s right, fuckers, we’re footnoting now.
A tragic fate. A cruel one. A deeply unfair one, too.
First, though, I need to tell you guys about the curry story.
Edge of Tomorrow was filmed in Warner Bros.’ Leavesden Studios, located just outside London near a town called Watford. That happens to be pretty close to where I live.
One night in August 2012, Tom decided he fancied a curry. He clearly, and quite reasonably decided that he didn’t want to spend any time in Watford, so Tom picked up a friend’s recommendation and made a reservation at a curry place called Veer Dhara, which is in St Albans (I live there!).
He ordered lobster curry and chicken tikka masala, because Tom is a curry monster. I’ll leave what happened next to the local BBC News report.
Cruise, who tops Forbes Magazine's list of highest-paid actors, tried to settle the £220.85 bill by American Express.
The restaurant does not take that card, so another member of the party paid in cash and left a £79.15 tip.
Tragic.
What I truly love about this story is that Veer Dhara - my go-to Indian takeaway option in town, so good choice from Tom - has milked the shit out of this eleven-year old encounter.
They made a little menu change for him.
This is also emblazoned on the wall outside.
There isn’t a point to this story. It just makes me smile.
In fact, my brief researching of this story unearthed a more recent Cruise curry tale, from when he was filming Dead Reckoning Part One in 2021, in which he sat down at a Birmingham curry house for two hours and did this:
“Tom ordered our famous Chicken Tikka Masala and enjoyed it so much that as soon as he had finished, he ordered it all over again - The greatest compliment.”
The man is a fucking curry fiend. He approaches sitting down for an Indian like he’s preparing for a major stunt: maximum commitment, never backing down. I think this is one of his most admirable traits.
I do think he’s gotta branch out from tikka masala, though. Get some spice in you, Tom. Enough of that white boy stuff.
Edge of Tomorrow is a masterpiece.
Fuck you. I mean it. I’m not on that “this is cinema”, “yeah, I’m thinking 5 stars” Twitter film bro hyperbole thing. This isn’t like when someone insists Madagascar is a masterpiece because it was their favourite film when they were six. This is a real-ass movie opinion, and you can trust me, because I have an unmoving 600ish followers on Twitter and a free Substack account.
It is immaculate. You could eat your dinner off of its screenplay. It is perfectly-oiled, finely crafted blockbuster entertainment.
Anyway, that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because of what Tom Cruise is up to.
The argument I’ve been going at throughout this series is that the Mission: Impossible movies are the best reflection of Tom Cruise’s self-perception, and therefore the image he wants to project out to the world of himself, at the given time of release. Ethan Hunt is vaguely defined and fluidly characterised because Cruise’s own image-making priorities are fluid. Particularly in III and Ghost Protocol, where Ethan Hunt’s entire circumstance and most of his personality changes between movies, he serves a particular purpose in where Cruise’s career was going.
While III takes Cruise and his status as the ultimate wife guy deathly seriously, Ghost Protocol allows him to have a little more fun. We covered that bit. The thing is, though, is that there was an effort to that fun. He needed to be fun. He needed to be a likeable team player. Most crucially, he still needed to be absolutely awesome. Ethan Hunt cracks smiles and makes jokes in Ghost Protocol, but he’s still much, much cooler than Jeremy Renner.
By contrast, Edge of Tomorrow has fun with Tom Cruise. By virtue of the live-die-repeat (Cruise/Blunt/Edgeoftomorrow) time loop premise, Cruise spends most of this movie as a cosmic plaything. He is blown up, shot, evaporated by sizzling alien blood, run over, shot again, drowned, electrocuted and then shot again. He is a ragdoll thrown about for our amusement, and the movie wants you to laugh at that.
Really, it makes it easy for you. Cruise’s character, whose name I have chosen to forget because it doesn’t matter, starts off as a smarmy bureaucrat coward who is thrown into an action movie against his will. He’s such a dick in the opening act. You want to see this little fucker suffer. It’s quite a shift from Ethan Hunt, one which feels like a considerably less exaggerated derivation of Cruise’s blowhard from Tropic Thunder. The effect is that Cruise looks startlingly relaxed here. He’s having a good time playing a douchebag, pratfalling all over for the place for the audience’s amusement.
All this tomfoolery opens up space for Emily Blunt, who plays Edge’s real hero. Slap-bang in the middle of the 2010s’ pop-feminist moment, Blunt’s character could so easily have fallen into the mould of the “cooler than the boys” emotionless girlboss - the kind of figure born from a studio realisation that a sheen of corporate progressiveness was profitable in small doses. Partly thanks to Blunt’s incandescent work, and partly thanks to the deft screenplay, this very much doesn’t happen. Rita Vrataski, a name I do choose to remember, is a for-real legend, a heroine who sits alongside Furiosa as a great example of what happens when blockbuster screenwriters actually care about writing their women.
It’s hard not to draw a line between Blunt’s co-star status in Edge and the introduction of the franchise’s first genuinely successful female lead in the next Mission - Cruise and his team had finally worked out how to cede the spotlight when it counts.
Does this make Tom Cruise a feminist king? I mean, no. Not at all. It’s weird that it took this long for him to acknowledge the existence of women. But for whatever reason this shift in career strategy - late-career feminist re-awakening, commercial savvy, genuine curiosity in sharing the spotlight - occurred, the results do speak for themselves. The results are really good.
I’d like to make an extended metaphor, if that’s okay.
Edge of Tomorrow is, in a rarity for latter-day Cruise, a love story. It’s a Groundhog Day love story, to be specific, so it’s not the original kind. One person is in the time loop, building a relationship with someone, and the other person is not - destined to forget everything that happened in that same day. No matter Rita Vrataski’s understanding of the time loop situation, no matter the amount of emotional connection built up over 24 hours - everything resets eventually, and the relationship has to begin again.
You know what I just realised? The myth of Sisyphus is a time loop story. Thought for food.
Tom Cruise is in love with the movie-going audience. It is, perhaps, his one true love. Perhaps one day long ago, he was a regular man, but now he is a vessel for entertainment. His character in Edge doesn’t match his usual persona exactly, but what the character does - the rag-dolling, the pratfalling, the maybe-futile death-defying - that’s Tom in a nutshell. That’s what he does. That’s all he does.
I think, despite all the marks you could make against him, that desire to entertain is sincere. We’ll get more into this with Top Gun: Maverick, but his love of cinema and moviegoers borders on the religious.
Tom is in love with us. But are we in love with him? Well, it depends. For a time, we were. The period of Top Gun through to about War of the Worlds, where he was consistently one of America’s biggest movie stars - what is that except a long-term relationship?
Then came the problems. Tom started to act out. Tom started talking too much about his weird religion. Tom started jumping on sofas and speaking out against psychiatry. The relationship strained. We forgot a great deal of why we loved him in the first place. The relationship reset.
We forgot, but Tom didn’t. Our forgetting made him try even harder. Ghost Protocol was the beginning, but Edge of Tomorrow is maybe the crystalline example of Tom’s desire to make us remember, just how his character wants to make Emily Blunt remember. He’s fucking working for it. He wants us to forget all the valid reasons why we took a break from him, why we explored people on the side He wants us to know…
Well, he wants us to know if we can love him again.
He needs to know. He needs to know now. Can we love him again?
Look at his cheeky bloody smile. He knows. He knows he’s done the work.
But the work continues. Edge of Tomorrow underperformed. It was liked by audiences and critically acclaimed, but it fell short. The work wasn’t enough this time.
Maybe that’s why Tom is smiling. He knows he’s not done yet either, and he’s okay with that. Maybe he’s smiling not because he’s gotten back with us, but because he knows we’re thinking about it. A few more grand gestures, and we’re in the pocket.
Fine. Fine, Tom. What have you got for us, then? Flowers? Chocolates? The best Mission: Impossible yet?
Oh, Tom. We can’t quit you, can we?
Next time: The best Mission: Impossible yet.
But our Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation newsletter isn’t really about Tom Cruise, for once. We have somebody else to discuss: his most consistent collaborator, the architect of latter-day Cruise. Maybe also his life partner?