Edge of Tomorrow (12A) 113 mins ***
Maleficent (PG) 95 mins ***
The week’s widest releases suggest how, even in
2014, Hollywood continues to gender audiences. In the blue corner, we find
man’s-man Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow,
a well-tempered sci-fi item that welds the military hardware of Starship Troopers, Avatar and the Terminator
movies, a streak of WW2 scholarship, and the irresistible be-kind-rewind
conceit of 2011’s Source Code. If
that sounds a lot of referents, well, that’s Doug Liman’s film in a
titanium-plated nutshell: it’s déjà vu all over again, but that doesn’t stop it
from making a virtue of it for some of its duration.
Cruise’s Major William Cage is a slick Army
spokesperson whose TV appearances recruit expendable fodder for an ongoing war
against some rooty-looking aliens known as Mimics. After angering
warmonger-in-chief Brendan Gleeson, Cage receives a nasty shock: demoted to
private status, he’s shipped off to fight exactly that fight he’s been
schilling for. Call it payback for Top
Gun. Dropped into Verdun – in a sequence engineered as a self-conscious
upgrade of Saving Private Ryan’s
opening assault – the guileless Cage is instantly killed. At which point, he’s
revived several days prior, to fight once more. And die. And fight. And die.
You get the idea.
The credited source is Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel
“All You Need is Kill”, but one could add to that any number of videogames: its
constituent missions – will Tom time his roll under that jeep right this time?
– offer the pleasure of experiencing a character (and film) getting smarter
with each pass. It’s a conceit that works almost as well for a soldier
scrabbling for intel as it did for Bill Murray’s lovelorn weatherman in Groundhog Day: Cage has his own Andie
MacDowell in Emily Blunt as the Army postergirl he drops alongside, and here an
entertaining if inherently derivative entertainment touches upon something
novel, possibly even progressive.
Major Cage’s ultimate calling, it proves, is as
driver-cum-wingman for Blunt’s mission to take down the big boss, and it’s
amusing to watch Cruise – at his least buff – ceding some of his usual control
to his co-star: Liman makes a wry comic point of having Blunt off several
provisional Toms once it’s established her timeline has no further use for
them. Onlooking wives and girlfriends might just wish such string theory was
more widely applicable – and in inspiring such potent role-reversal fantasies, Edge of Tomorrow gestures towards a
vision of the sexes at least as supple and striking as its myriad tenticular
lifeforms.
Elsewhere, you sense women and children being
ushered towards Maleficent, Disney’s
live-action rethink of the Sleeping Beauty tale. Given that this narrative has
already attracted the attentions of such avowedly feminist filmmakers as
Catherine Breillat and Julia Leigh, one might wonder what there is to gain from
seeing it further Disneyfied, but a semi-commendable otherness swirls around at
least its opening acts; set against the Broadway-ready blandness of the
corporation’s recent Frozen, it’s
practically Angela Carter.
The thrust of Robert Stromberg’s film – adapted by
Mouse House favourite Linda Woolverton (Beauty
and the Beast, The Lion King) –
is that before succumbing to nominative determinism, curse-issuing fairy
Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) lived a perfectly happy existence talking to the
trees; that she turned to the dark side only after her sweetheart returned from
a neighbouring patriarchy and, while she was sleeping, removed her of her wings.
Aha, you cry: symbolism.
Woolverton’s boldest idea is to reimagine the
original’s villainess as a vampish single mum, raising her despoiler’s
firstborn Aurora (Elle Fanning) deep in Mother Nature’s bosom while daddy
(Sharlto Copley) is away sabre-rattling. Even if it only involves flicking
Aurora off a cliff, it’s Maleficent who’s left playing with this child; in her
considered disdain, Woolverton proposes, there might be seen a form of parental
love. Thus can the film hold a flattering mirror up to its audience: it makes a
heroine of a careworn woman who just wants her little princess to sleep
through.
There are competing influences here, and whenever
it starts going somewhere interesting, some unseen committee intervenes to
nudge everyone back towards the centre ground. As in Frozen, the men are such underwritten saps that the girls’ triumph
feels a thin one, and the third act follows a template laid down by far boysier
films in having its better ideas superceded by castle-smashing spectacle. Jolie,
ever-arch, carries it so far: it functions on a par with 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman in offering
okayish diversion without ever being as witty, radical or lasting as it might.
A light sleeper, if you will.
Edge of Tomorrow and Maleficent are in cinemas nationwide.
