Within
minutes of this film starting I was on its side. Why?
It
is about an alien invasion of Earth, but not of the USA; this time it’s Europe.
A
multinational force has been fighting these aliens, led by – an Irish General.
And
Tom Cruise was playing a cowardly, malingering, mendacious American
Officer, Major Cage, a PR man who
wanted to stay as far away from the action as possible.
When
Cage was demoted and sent to the front lines to be insulted and demeaned by
Master Sergeant Bill Pullman I cheered up even more. And I was always aware that Emily Blunt was just
waiting to make her entrance.
OK, so I knew that the premise of this movie was the Video Game conceit that when you die you get another life,
and can use whatever you learnt before you died to help you survive this
time, and the next - that is was
essentially Groundhog Day meets Halo, but the pace and wit
of the movie, and the way it expected the audience to keep their wits about
them, rather than being led gently by the hand through any difficult
transitions, all encouraged
me. And then Emily did
arrive - and she was magnificent.
Sgt Rita was the real warrior. OK, so the aliens were very similar to the robots of The
Matrix 2,
and the warriors wore exo-skeletons that reminded me of Ripley in her Waldo
suit in Aliens, in fact Emily Blunt’s character has a lot of
the later Ripley about her, but no harm in that, and this movie played its
frequent and witty references and tropes without becoming a parody, unlike, for
instance, Cruise’s last SF effort, Oblivion, which just seemed like
a mix and match script written by people who might have read SF but had never
written any of it; utterly lacking in originality. I even enjoyed the timing of the release,
enacting an invasion of Europe on screen to save it from terror and
destruction, so close to the commemoration of the original D. Day.
I
liked the way Cruise slowly becomes a hero not by becoming a killing machine but by being prepared to
die, time after time until his goal is reached. I like the way his character became likeable by not
trying to be likeable. I also
liked the way Emily Blunt became impressive without trying to be
impressive. I remember that
when I saw her in The Adjustment Bureau and saw her dance I assumed she had trained before becoming an
actor. But then, when I
discovered that she had no previous experience as a dancer, I was even more
impressed by her physical authority. The same goes here. She completes her choreographed moves with grace and power.
Despite
the inevitable reiterations of the day of invasion, the battle that has to be
repeated until Cage and Rita get
it right, I was kept on the edge
of my seat. And I laughed a
lot. Not at the movie, but with
the movie. At one stage I was even tempted to cheer, and felt a similar frisson in the audience around me. In fact I was so
satisfied that I even forgave its Spielbergian ending. Spielberg always gives us
what we want. He just makes us
wait for it, and then delivers it in ways we did not expect, as when ET and
Peter take flight in his bicycle.
So
congratulations to Doug Liman, who
directed it using the skills he honed during the Bourne
franchise; to Christopher
McQuarrie, who wrote the labyrinthine The Usual Suspects, and Jez
Butterworth, who wrote this and Fair Game with McQuarrie; to Dion Beeb who filmed this and had previously shot Collateral and Chicago; and perhaps most of all to James
Herbert, who edited it with daring and precision (just the characteristics displayed, as it happens, by Emily
Blunt, and Rita, the warrior). Herbert edited both the recent Sherlock
Holmes
movies, and the two of the terrible films he has edited, Sweeney and Gangster
Squad,
were not bad because of the editing.
No blame there.
