Listen now | Today’s movie is Edge of Tomorrow directed by Doug Liman. We both think this movie is pretty stupid. The Groundhog-Day-style concept has the potential to tell a compelling story of character growth, but Edge of Tomorrow really falls flat and completely sputters out by the end. You get the feeling that the source material might be an interesting story, but this movie isn’t.
May 31, 2023Liked by Casey Muratori, Anna Rettberg
What I found particularly disturbing from Edge of Tomorrow were the scenes where the woman killed the main character as a way of reseting things (Sorry, I've already forgotten their names). At first my idea of how things were working was like Primer, where the world was moving to a new timeline for the main character, while everyone else moved on - so the woman would have been arrested and convicted of murder.
But as y'all discussed, the reset is for the entire world, which is far more disturbing, and makes her behavior really bizarre. Since her mind is reset, that means after she pulls that trigger, from her perspective, her existence ends. The fact that there is a reset version of her somewhere else is of no comfort to her. She ceases to be, and the version of her that now exists is essentially a clone of herself from that past moment. There is no consistency of memory, so there is no consciousness passed along. (The game Soma depicts the terror of this rather well)
The way she takes this action so casually, it's almost as if she's taking on the interests of the audience, and she's resetting the film for our sake, because it certainly can't be for her sake. Her life is over.
I guess we're supposed to overlook these kinds of elements for a film of this tone, but if that's true, then I think it's better to avoid scenes in which characters explicitly take actions which provoke these questions. Just have the main character die directly from the accidents, and then we don't have to get sidelined by terrifying existential quandaries.
What I found particularly disturbing from Edge of Tomorrow were the scenes where the woman killed the main character as a way of reseting things (Sorry, I've already forgotten their names). At first my idea of how things were working was like Primer, where the world was moving to a new timeline for the main character, while everyone else moved on - so the woman would have been arrested and convicted of murder.
But as y'all discussed, the reset is for the entire world, which is far more disturbing, and makes her behavior really bizarre. Since her mind is reset, that means after she pulls that trigger, from her perspective, her existence ends. The fact that there is a reset version of her somewhere else is of no comfort to her. She ceases to be, and the version of her that now exists is essentially a clone of herself from that past moment. There is no consistency of memory, so there is no consciousness passed along. (The game Soma depicts the terror of this rather well)
The way she takes this action so casually, it's almost as if she's taking on the interests of the audience, and she's resetting the film for our sake, because it certainly can't be for her sake. Her life is over.
I guess we're supposed to overlook these kinds of elements for a film of this tone, but if that's true, then I think it's better to avoid scenes in which characters explicitly take actions which provoke these questions. Just have the main character die directly from the accidents, and then we don't have to get sidelined by terrifying existential quandaries.