Of Heroes and Talking Trees
by Andrew Collins
Edge of Tomorrow — the latest Tom Cruise-as-demigod vehicle — is one of those films that does not have a single original element but manages to combine familiar tropes in entertaining fashion. The pieces are Groundhog Day (repeating day), Ender’s Game (humans vs. hive-mind aliens), and the Halo video games (supersuits and cool weapons). At the center of this coward-to-manhood tale stands the proven action star, Cruise, and the oddly-cast but compelling Emily Blunt.
For Cruise, the role of Major William Cage is a welcome shift from his usual typecasting because he starts out as a wimp — nothing more than a talking head from the Army who looks good on camera and can sell America on a war. “You can’t send me into combat,” he protests to the Western Alliance commander, General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson), but — after a taser and a demotion — to the front lines he goes. Damned to the crucible of warfare, his character is refined into a courageous hero. Aside from Emily Blunt gracing the screen with her presence, this is the film’s only point of redemption.
It’s unfortunate for Edge of Tomorrow that Ender’s Game came out last year, because otherwise the aliens may have been interesting. Their gyrating, fanatic, octopus-like bodies make them a little scary at first, but whatever originality these so-called “mimics” have in form they lack in their nature. Take out the “hive queen” central intelligence, and the rest instantly die away.
Cage’s day restarts every time he dies — thanks to some sort of alien-mind-meld that takes place in his first battle. As the day repeats dozens of times, I couldn’t quite make the emotional jump into the film’s universe. After an hour of watching him taking a bullet or being mugged by a mimic every couple minutes, we end up numb to the tragedy of the whole ordeal rather than exploring the psychological strain of living the same day over and over again. It’s good fun and all, but by the time Edge of Tomorrow gets to the kiss, it feels cinematically obligatory rather than fulfilling.
As goes the kiss, so goes the film. Its mind-bending premise left me thinking, “I could ponder a lot more about the ‘rules’ of this whole time travel thing and how these aliens work, but if I did I’d probably find a bunch of plot holes, so I won’t.”
At that point, there’s nothing left for it but to kick your feet up and pass the popcorn.
The X-Men return with the predictable mutant struggle to belong. By film number seven in the X series, Days of Future Past, it’s a well-worn conflict, but a good one. Can the mutants convince the rest of humanity to coexist? Given that they’re human themselves, and hence flawed, it is once again a tall order.
This time, however, in a clever move that opened the door for as much star power as possible (read: Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Lawrence, Sir Patrick Stewart, Sir Ian McClellan, James McAvoy, Ellen Paige, Halle Berry) it requires going back in time to fix the mutant sins that triggered a human crusade against them.
Normally time travel makes a risky plot device because of how it inevitably stresses a story’s probability and necessity, but Days of Future Past makes it tolerable by restricting it to a single jump back by a single character. One mutant has the power to send someone’s consciousness back in time. It takes her full concentration and is typically restricted by the psyche of her subject to just a few days. But as the laws of the Marvel universe would have it, the one character capable of withstanding the trauma from being thrown that far back is the man least fit for the job: the Wolverine. Tasked with convincing a young, drug-dependent Charles Xavier to dissuade Mystique from murdering an anti-mutant scientist, Logan makes a fine reluctant hero. His blunt, muscles-and-claws style ensures consistent comedic conflict and keeps the film from taking itself too seriously.
We never quite learn how Professor X survived. Even after a cursory Google search the explanation is tenuous, but after the post-credits scene in last year’s film The Wolverine, we’re so happy to see him alive that we don’t really care. But once we’ve made that jump, the rest of Days of Future Past is made up of almost nothing we didn’t see or know from the previous X-Men films. Namely that Hugh Jackman was born to play Wolverine, the X-Men will win their salvation by a great, idealistic display of goodness toward humanity, and if you thought Magneto had hit his limit of how much metal he could control, well, you were wrong. The submarine from First Class was small potatoes. Try a sports stadium.
If there’s such a thing as a platonic ideal for “summer action flicks,” Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy achieves it.
It’s Firefly meets Star Wars meets Thor, packaged in the pop-rock soundtrack of that souped-up hot rod you had back in the eighties. Swashbuckling Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), who still has his cassette mixtape from when he was abducted from earth 26 years ago, has the makings of a young Malcolm Reynolds – brave, foolhardy, stubborn, and a natural leader. The mercenary duo Rocket and Groot, a fast-talking, genetically enhanced raccoon and an ent-like creature whose vocabulary is limited to the line “I am Groot,” play off each other like Han and Chewbacca. The evil Ronan the Accuser, with his scepter and body paint and muscles, looks like he should be facing off against an Asgardian god.
Put another way, Guardians of the Galaxy is the type of story a junior higher would come up with, but in the best way possible. Mighty warlords, wily scavengers, and the galactic republic flit across the galaxy in the quest to unlock the secrets of a coveted orb – a palm-sized Death Star. With outlandish space-ships, giant guns, colorful creatures, and a sexy green-skinned assassin, Guardians is comic-book in style, but mythic in scope. It self-consciously makes zero pretensions to realism or sentimentality. Like its rebellious heroes, it knows when to break the rules.
Midway through, for example, Peter makes a daring rescue of Gamora (Zoe Saldana) by flinging himself into space without a suit. As they’re lying on top of each other in the bay of a spaceship a few seconds later, they’re about to have a mushy Hollywood moment, but then he comes out and says that he saved her because he had a sudden, unexplainable surge of selflessness and bravery. The audience laughs at the twist – half at ourselves for thinking a film without a serious frame from start to finish would embrace such tripe. Even at the climax, when Ronan is about to vaporize an entire planet, Peter decides to distract him by busting out his dance moves – complete with his own beat boxing — and challenging him to a dance-off.
Better still, Guardians manages to do this without neglecting character. Underneath the clever barbs we do, in fact, find heart – thoughtful and developed with more than an afterthought. The guardians are a bunch of rejected, victimized loners. They’ve lost family and friends, or never had any to begin with. They come together in a prison, united by independent, ignoble motives in what turns out to be a noble cause. Many punches and laser blasts are exchanged between them on the long path to friendship. And it takes absurdly high stakes – like a villain attempting to wipe out a planet – for them to put their broken pasts and conflicting goals aside for the great cause of guarding the galaxy.
