Especially if perfection in life is conceived principally in terms of tasks to get finished, skills to master and even ecstasies to achieve. If the everlasting is anything like this, a Viking’s dream of pitched battle by day (perhaps against a host of fallen angels?) and mead hall happiness by night (perhaps with a host of Emily Blunts?), couldn’t it still maybe, eventually, grow a little dull? On a positive front, the film prompts some reflections on the nature of repetition and eternity. And if we aren’t exactly sure how it all fits together at the end, the producers have done their best to assure us we should feel good about it. Cage’s promised romance with Special Forces soldier Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), a one-time time controller herself, never quite lifts off the ground, annoyingly, but perhaps this is fair enough: it is already difficult for two working professionals to meet and get serious in this world without one of them getting repeatedly tossed into a timeloop. Hollywood-standard images of teeth-gnashing, soldierly death in the face of double machine guns blazing do, however, get partnered with innovative, even at times dazzling CGI action art. Yet overall the tone is earnest, even teetering on the brink of dire. The scenes are selected carefully to keep things moving, with even a welcome dash or two of playful tongue-in-cheek with the film’s high-concept motif. But the main triumph of the film is that it conveys the fact of the tedium without the feeling. If it all sounds a little tiresome, for Cage it clearly is. Like the hero in a video game stuck at some impassable boss but packing plenty of extra lives, Cage will have a couple of hundred goes at customising his armature, memorising the enemies’ formations and perfecting an exact sequence of rolls, sidesteps and mad dashes away from enemy fire. It is they who control time and, whether or not the logic is tighter than can be deduced from a single viewing, the implication is clear. There is none of Bill Murray’s teddy-bear tenderness here, and the insect-like aliens are served up with a brain-bending twist. An insightful viewer called the film Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers, and this says a lot. Rather, he does die, all the time, but snaps back again and again to relive the same day. Ever since he was sprayed with the time-altering blood of a ‘Mimic’ at the D-Day equivalent of the alien wars, he can no longer die. Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) is not so lucky. Most of us do not have to end each day being dissolved by acid, shot through the head or skewered by invading aliens. It’s just back to the grindstone, once more through the paces, and somebody’s got a bad case of the Mondays. Some days feel as if they are never going to end. Starring: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton
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