![]() Vrataski trains Cage and accompanies him into battle. Soon, reawakening at the British base, Cage chooses a martial mentor: Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), a commando fighter who was the heroine of the U.D.F.’s one prior military victory on the continent (she’s nicknamed the Angel of Verdun, extending a metaphor one generation back). ![]() The crucial and delicious detail is that Cage’s curse, to die again endlessly (though, somehow, seemingly painlessly), affords him a limitless capacity to learn on the job-each return to battle is both another lesson in warfare and another chance to probe the enemy’s vulnerabilities. Yet the movie hidden behind “Edge of Tomorrow” isn’t “Groundhog Day” but, rather, “Saving Private Ryan.” The terrifyingly gory opening sequence of Steven Spielberg’s film-the landing at Omaha Beach-poses a fundamental question about war: If the D Day combat had been reported in real time and in detail, if the uncensored newsreel footage that it generated played like Spielberg’s realistic scene-with its dismembered limbs, dangling viscera, incinerated bodies, cries of agony, scattered corpses, and waves of blood-would the American public have tolerated the pursuit of the war until the enemies’ surrender? And would sufficient numbers of American men have fought in it willingly? “Edge of Tomorrow,” as everyone already knows, is a sci-fi war film with a “Groundhog Day”-like premise: Cruise plays a soldier who, after being killed in combat, awakens the day before the battle and must relive, over and over, the moment of his death. The metaphorical overlay of fantasy and history is the best thing “Edge of Tomorrow” has to offer-and, for much of its running time, that overlay is enough to lend the movie a shiver of curious power. It opens this Friday, June 6th, the seventieth anniversary of D Day-and that massive and decisive Normandy landing, tweaked to fit the movie’s futuristic premise, is also its main dramatic event. It’s rare that the art of movies and the business of their distribution coincide as closely as they do with “Edge of Tomorrow,” the director Doug Liman’s new science-fiction vehicle for Tom Cruise.
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