It’s rarely a compliment to say that a movie is video game-like. That’s usually shorthand for effects-heavy, narratively lightweight CGI shoot-em-ups. Don’t get me wrong: Edge of Tomorrow has no shortage of big effects set pieces, a lot of invading aliens getting shot at, and the seemingly ageless Tom Cruise performing death-defying acts on a battlefield. Except that he doesn’t defy death, and that’s where the film borrows an important quality of video games to anchor its story: death is never the end.
Death in a video game means rebooting, going back to the last save point and trying again, this time presumably ready for what killed you last time. That’s the situation facing Major William Cage (Cruise), a weaselly military PR flack who gets railroaded onto the battlefield by a hardened general (Brendan Gleeson) who feels it’s soldier’s wartime duty is to spend at least a little time on the front lines. In this case that means putting on a mechanized exoskeletal battle suit and going up against a horde of “mimics,” fearsome alien creatures that have already conquered much of the earth.
Cage, woefully unprepared for battle, can’t even figure out how to turn the safety off on the suit’s guns when he gets dropped, D-Day-style, onto a French beachhead, only to die a few minutes later; and then awake the day before, back on the base just when this nightmare began. So begins his own video game, in which he eventually lives on the battlefield long enough to meet Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), a soldier he only knows by reputation, because he’d been using her image in recruiting efforts following her heroic efforts in humanity’s only victory in the war so far.
Turns out, her skill at that battle grew out of becoming caught in a loop similar to the one Cage is in now. Hers ended, but when she realizes Cage is going through the same thing, she instructs him to meet up with her after the next time he dies so they can work together.