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phillipbirch
Reviews
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
It's not Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day!
Live, Die, Repeat: Edge of tomorrow.
The often quoted description of the film is "A cross between 'Starship Troopers' and 'Groundhog Day'.". That may give an idea of the genre, but EOT in my opinion, surpasses both its parents and deserves the IMDb 7.9/10, despite the latter's 8.0/10 rating.
Tom Cruise (Major William Cage) makes the transition well into a relatively weak story-line. However, although I'm not really an Emily Blunt fan, she is cast faultlessly as Rita R Vratasky, a role which suites her so well, one almost feels it's her real life alter ego.
Quite a bit of the story building is intentionally repetitive, to give a sense of Cage's seemingly endless daily nightmare of dying and having to repeat every day. However, that itself is somewhat overdone, because most viewers will be able to imagine that the tiny daily advances will take hundreds of repetitions.
The scene leading up to where Cage and Vrataski finally get off the beach is probably the most memorable part of the film showing top class direction and production, then combining all the action, CGI and music (by Christophe Beck, who wrote the music for Frozen).
The plot does both lose its way and fade in excitement a little towards the middle of the film and the conclusion you will probably see coming even with both eyes closed. Still, it is worth watching to the end, unlike a lot of films I've stuck with, only to be disappointed.
Shadows on the Wall (2015)
Weak in all aspects
The film fails on most levels. An obsessive 'techie' driven by an idea which actually works, eventually. This is already a feeble "What if ..." to justify what could have been a good starting point.
Unfortunately, the plot fails to live up to the original premise. Worse, the characters end up explaining the gaps in the plot to each other, since the production is unable to do so.
The next refuge is the 'shot in a cupboard' environment. The producer obviously thought "We don't need much in the way of expensive special effects if nobody can see the environment anyway". The remaining need for special effects is just tacked-on and would have looked cheap ten years before it was actually produced.
Finally (no spoiler), the end is almost embarrassingly predictable. A real 'B' Movie.