So the new Tom Cruise sci-fi action movie Edge of Tomorrow is based on a Japanese novel with the much better title “All You Need is Kill”. It’s also a sci-fi version of Groundhog Day, it’s a live action video game, it’s Source Code, and it’s all sorts of things you may have seen before and you may think you never want to see again or at all (for the first time). But I’m here to say this is a really good, really smart, really funny (without being dumb) movie. Don’t let bad marketing or Tom Cruise get in the way – this is one of the better movies of the year.

Tom Cruise starts the movie as the worst version of Tom Cruise (smug, smarmy, using his personality to weasel his way out of something) and through the course of the movie becomes the heroic Tom Cruise… which doesn’t sounds like a recommendation but I say it this way to suggest he’s doing some real acting here beneath his Tom Cruise-ness. Emily Blunt is pretty great in a role that hovers close to romantic interest but has no real interest in going there – she gets to play a real badass, very competent soldier (nicknamed The Full Metal Bitch – which was from the novel but is never said out loud in the movie, maybe to retain a PG-13…even though the name is spraypainted as such and shown in a number of scenes… a little odd). And Bill Paxton has a hilarious, scene-stealing roll as a Kentucky-born master sergeant.

Basic plot is that Tom Cruise is caught in a Groundhog-Day-Like time loop and has to live a very bad day that leads to a very bad invasion of France to take it back from a squidy alien menace… and each time through the loop, he learns to survive a little bit longer, learns more about the aliens, and about his squad mates. What works is that it’s smart, it can cut together great action scenes with phenomenal visual effects, it makes sense, and allows the audience to think. I recommend this movie quite a bit.

Score: 87