Live. Die. Repeat.

I liked Edge Of Tomorrow enough that I put it on my 2014 top ten list. I've had a chance to watch it a few more times on cable and I'm glad to report it holds up. If you haven't seen it yet, I'm about to spoil the plot. So stop reading, check it out, and come back...okay, we up to speed?

The film, as many have noted, is Groundhog Day as an action movie.  All I can say is the formula works again.  Tom Cruise may have to live one day over and over, but the plot keeps moving forward. 

Actually, for all the resets, the film follows your classic three-act structure:

Act one: Tom Cruise is unwillingly sent into a battle zone to fight aliens threatening to take over the Earth.  He kills a creature and gets the power to live the same day over and over.

Act two: He finds war hero Emily Blunt, who once had the same power. Together, they live the day of the battle over and over, getting closer and closer to figuring out how to defeat the aliens.

Act three: Tom loses the power, so he and Emily have to win the day in their one last chance.

The film, directed by Doug Liman, is visually imaginative, giving us a grunt's-eye view of futuristic battle. But it's a lot more than big explosions--it has tension, humor and a fair amount of sentiment.

Part of the fun is Cruise starts as a coward, only learning to be a hero along the way. And when he first meets Blunt, she's the master and he's the student.  But as he learns, while she simply resets, he becomes the master and she the student.  And though he keeps learning, there are always newer, trickier obstacles to overcome.

The final act (though not bad) is probably the weakest part of the film.  It's got the highest stakes, but doesn't quite have the forward momentum where we get to see old scenes from new angles, and discover, along with the characters, how the aliens actually work.

While not a flop, the film was a financial disappointment, especially considering its budget and weak domestic take.  One reason may be that Tom Cruise had turned off a lot of people by 2014--if the film had been released in 2004 it probably would have been a different story.

In any case, that no longer matters.  The film is out there, ready to be discovered, or rediscovered, by anyone who wants to see one of the best action films of the past several years.