I wish I didn’t know you, but I do.

Edge of Tomorrow - 4.5/5

It is a video game movies in all of the obvious ways, but also in the more subtle ways that you learn at 3am when trying to beat the final boss in Metal Gear: Solid. It’s fun, it’s repetitive, and it’s frustrating. So fucking frustrating. This movie is funny, interesting, and its repetitions rarely feel repititious, but more than anything, it captures that frustration of having to beat the game. You can’t go to sleep until you beat the game. You lose so many times but you just can’t not win. Beyond that, it does most everything else right. Tom Cruise’s relationship with Emily Blunt isn’t romantic, though she is beautiful and strong and worthy of some romance, but built on the bonds of fighting next to someone over and over and over and over again. Their one shared kiss isn’t even romantic; it’s more of respect and kinship. “Thank you for fighting next to me.” “Thank you for believing me.” A kiss of shared reality. And all of it rests extraordinarily well on Tom Cruise’s shoulders. He gets to be the coward, the hero, the pawn, the mastermind, the shat upon, and the shitter of upon. The ending has this extraordinarily large chance to turn cheesy, but Tom Cruise smiles this dumb-shit smile and all is forgiven. He’s a goddamned movie star. This is how they do, bay-bee. In terms of flaws – with a few lines and odd wardrobe choices, it make its secondary characters bigger than they ever needed to be, but it doesn’t follow through with giving all of them a moment to live or die. The biggest, though, is that fucking title. “All You Need Is Kill” is an all-time great name. I hope they retroactively go back and fix it.