TRAILER TALK – EDGE OF TOMORROW
Recently I read All You Need Is Kill, an excellent novelette by Hiroshi Sakurazaka which deals with Keiji Kiriya, a trooper serving in the Japanese corps utilising power armour to repel an invasion of Japan by the alien Mimics, who are trying to take over the whole Earth. Only, in his first battle, he’s killed. Then he wakes up the next day.
See, Keiji is stuck in a “Groundhog Day loop” – reliving the last 24 hours of battle over and over again, trying to figure out a way to end it, until his 158th day, when Rita “Valkyrie” Vrataski AKA the Full Metal Bitch changes the nature of the loops forever for him.
It’s a great book, short, punchy, and written in a very straightforward style. It’s about 100 pages long, and while the plot hook may seem similar to the film Source Code, the novel came out in 2004 and was inspired by the videogaming trope of “save scumming” (saving before a major story point and reloading the save until you get a desirable outcome). Naturally, when I saw a film adaptation was in the works I was pretty excited. It has the kind of straightforward story that’d make a great summer action flick, and there’s potential for some awesome battle scenes. And then I saw who the stars were.
The film, after having its title changed to Edge of Tomorrow (a vastly less awesome title, in my personal opinion), casts Tom Cruise in the lead as Lieutenant Colonel William Cage, presumably serving in the American army, and Emily Blunt as Vrataski. And therein lies a major problem.
I’m not usually one to get up in arms about whitewashing in films. But in this case it’s so absolutely blatant that it has to be said. The book is by a Japanese author, about a Japanese soldier, fighting in Japan, with the only appearance by the Americans being a single Special Forces unit and Vrataski herself. The book was even more multicultural than that – the sergeant of Keiji’s unit is Brazilian-Japanese, and the mechanic who services Vrataski’s power-armoured “Jacket” is Native American. Sergeant ferrell’s role is being filled by Bill Paxton – a white man – and I highly doubt that we’ll see Shasta Raylle’s Native American character in the film. The entire film has been relocated to America, leading to the same thing we’ve seen a million times – Tom Cruise saves America, and the world, with a white woman at his side. I can’t give them any slack for their portrayal of Vrataski – even though the casting initially seems odd, Blunt is actually a good fit for Rita’s character, of an innocent, young, waifish girl with combat skills she shouldn’t have in a war she should never have been a part of.
Even the visual stylings of the film – it’s a summer blockbuster, so of course it’s going to be a CGI-fest – are remarkably westernised, with the look of the Jackets being much clunkier than I envisioned them upon reading the novel and taking clear inspiration from Halo and Starship Troopers. There was every opportunity to use the book’s Japanese origins to allow the CGI artists to go nuts and give us a unique film with East Asia-inspired mech suits and Ghost in the Shell-esque leanings, but instead it’s the same homogenized rubbish that can be found on the cover of any bargain-bin first-person shooter.
I really want this film to be good. It has a winning formula right there, but they seem willing to throw everything that would make it unique under the bus in favour of a quick buck, a simple-minded CGI slog where Tom Cruise saves the world again. Yay.
Read All You Need Is Kill, and tell me if Edge of Tomorrow is actually good when it comes out. I’ll need some serious convincing to part with my cash on this one.
