Edge of Tomorrow - Tom Cruise's return to sci-fi sees him stuck in a narrative device, but director Doug Liman gives us more to chew on in this blockbuster epic. ***

Doug Liman’s new movie is yet another science-fiction story that sees humans pitted against an alien invasion. Based on the novel by fiction and fantasy writer Hiroshi Sakurazaka, Edge of Tomorrow stars Tom Cruise as Major William Cage, a PR man spinning positive military propaganda about the war against the extra-terrestrials. However, after a meeting with General Brigham,(Brendan Gleeson) Cage is ordered to fight as a soldier on the front line. When he refuses to fight, Cage is forcibly sent to into battle and dropped headfirst into alien-D-Day-CGI carnage only to get stuck in a cosmic time loop in which he lives the same day of fighting over and over again - like a live-action video game where he ‘respawns’ in exactly the same place every time he dies.

Cruise’s role is more interesting than one would expect from this kind of blockbuster fare – Cage isn’t a hero, he’s a slimy, superficial, cowardly character and it is within these duplicitous qualities that Cruise has channelled his finest work in Michael Mann’s Collateral and P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia.

Nearly every review has mentioned Groundhog Day as Liman’s central touchstone device for describing how the time looping scenario works and indeed there is a moment where Tom Cruise says “what day is it?” and you almost expect Chris Elliot to jump out and say “it’s time to film the groundhog!” Furthermore, there are moments that derive Groundhog Day's similar strain of black humour from the fact that the central character dies incessantly in comical accidents.  However, when Emily Blunt's poster girl warrior character Rita, aka the “Full Metal Bitch”, is introduced the film begins to focus more on the pathos of being stuck in time in a way that is more reminiscent of the thwarted love narrative of Duncan Jones’s film Source Code. While Edge of Tomorrow is not nearly as distinctive as Source Code, (its industrial future war aesthetic clearly owing a debt to James Cameron’s Aliens and a kind of post-Judgement Day vision of the world from the Terminator movies) there is an engaging, human emphasis to the story that works well alongside the hefty action sequences.