Edge of Tomorrow [EN]

Edge of Tomorrow is a 2014 American science fiction action film directed by Doug Liman and written by Christopher McQuarrie and the writing team of Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, loosely based on the Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. Starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, the film takes place in a future where most of Europe is occupied by an alien race. Major William Cage (Cruise), a public relations officer with limited combat experience, is forced by his superiors to join a landing operation against the aliens, only to find himself experiencing a time loop as he tries to find a way to defeat the invaders. Bill Paxton and Brendan Gleeson also cast as supporting roles.

In late 2009, 3 Arts Entertainment purchased the rights to All You Need Is Kill and sold a spec script to the American studio Warner Bros. The studio produced Edge of Tomorrow with the involvement of 3 Arts, the novel's publisher Viz Media, and Australian production company Village Roadshow. Filming began in late 2012, taking place in England: at WB Studios in Leavesden, outside London, and other locations, such as London's Trafalgar Square and the coastal Saunton Sands. A total of nine companies handled the visual effects.

Warner Bros. spent over $100 million advertising Edge of Tomorrow. It was released in cinemas on the weekend of May 30, 2014, in 28 territories, and 36 additional territories a week later. The film received positive reviews from critics, who praised the plot, direction, action sequences, and performances. It grossed over $370.5 million worldwide in its theatrical run.

Plot

In 2015, an alien race known as "Mimics" lands in Germany and swiftly conquers much of continental Europe, killing millions. By 2020, humanity has formed a global military alliance, the United Defense Force (UDF), to combat the Mimics. However, victory remained elusive until the recent Battle of Verdun, which was secured by the celebrated war hero Sergeant Rita Vrataski.

In Britain, the UDF masses forces for a major invasion of France. General Brigham orders public affairs officer Major William Cage to cover the offensive from the frontline, but the inexperienced and cowardly Cage attempts to blackmail Brigham into rescinding the order. Brigham has Cage arrested, demoted to Private and sent to the military base at Heathrow Airport to join the invasion as infantry. He is assigned to Master Sergeant Farell and the misfit J-Squad, who dislike and belittle him. The following day, the invasion forces land on a French beach but are ambushed and massacred by Mimics. Cage uses a Claymore mine to kill a larger "Alpha" Mimic, becoming covered in its blood and mortally wounding himself in the ensuing explosion.

Cage suddenly awakens at Heathrow, finding he is reliving the previous morning. He makes failed attempts to warn against the invasion and experiences multiple loops in which he dies on the beach and awakens at Heathrow, his battlefield knowledge and skills increasing with each loop. He tries to save Vrataski's life so she can lead them but, after recognizing his apparent prescience, she allows herself to die, ordering Cage to find her on his next loop. Cage quickly convinces the reset Vrataski because she gained the same power after exposure to an Alpha's blood. Her loops enabled her, an initially inexperienced soldier, to win at Verdun, but a later blood transfusion removed the power. Vrataski takes Cage to Mimic expert Dr. Carter who explains the creatures are a superorganism controlled by a single, gigantic "Omega" Mimic. Whenever the Alpha Mimics are killed, the Omega restarts a loop and adjusts its tactics until the Mimics win. Vrataski realizes the Mimics allowed the UDF victory at Verdun to make them overconfident in their new mech-suits and lure them into overcomitting their forces in retaking Europe, allowing the Mimics to exterminate most of the resistance.

Cage spends many loops training with Vrataski so they can reach the Omega, but he begins to care for her and struggles after seeing her repeatedly die. He experiences a vision of the Omega concealed in a German dam and he and Vrataski seek it out. During the journey, the pair bond, but Vrataski remains distant, having seen someone she cared about die hundreds of times at Verdun. She eventually determines that this is not the first loop in which they approached the Omega. Cage reveals that she always dies at this point regardless of his actions and he is unwilling to kill the Omega and end the loops if she will remain dead. Upset, Vrataski attempts to leave but is killed by a Mimic. Despondent, during the next loop Cage travels to the dam alone. He learns the vision was a trap and is ambushed by an Alpha but Cage is killed before it can remove his power.

To find the Omega, Cage and Vrataski sneak into General Brigham's office and pressure him into handing over a prototype transponder designed by Carter. Having used it to locate the Omega beneath the Louvre Pyramid in Paris, Cage is knocked unconscious during their escape and given a blood transfusion for his injuries, removing his power. Vrataski frees Cage and he uses his detailed knowledge of J-Squad to convince them to help destroy the Omega. They fly to Paris where the squad sacrifices themselves to ensure Cage and Vrataski reach the Louvre. Cornered by an Alpha, Vrataski kisses Cage, lamenting that she does not have more time to get to know him. The Alpha kills Vrataski and mortally wounds Cage, but he drops several grenades that destroy the Omega and bathe him in its blood.

Cage awakens several days earlier to a news announcement that all Mimics are dead following a mysterious energy surge in Paris. Cage returns to Heathrow and finds Vrataski. Oblivious to his identity, she enquires what he wants; Cage smiles.

Cast

• Tom Cruise as Major William Cage
• Emily Blunt as Sergeant Rita Vrataski
• Bill Paxton as Master Sergeant Farell
• Brendan Gleeson as General Brigham
• Noah Taylor as Dr. Noah Carter
• Kick Gurry as Griff
• Dragomir Mrsic as Kuntz
• Charlotte Riley as Nance
• Jonas Armstrong as Skinner
• Franz Drameh as Ford
• Masayoshi Haneda as Takeda
• Tony Way as Kimmel
• Madeleine Mantock as Corporal Julie Montgomery
• Harry Landis as Old Man 3
• Crew
• Doug Liman in front of a steel beam.
• Director Doug Liman at the Paris premiere of the film
• Doug Liman – director
• Christopher McQuarrie – co-writer
• Jez Butterworth – co-writer
• John-Henry Butterworth – co-writer
• Erwin Stoff – producer
• Tom Lassally – producer
• Jeffrey Silver – producer
• Gregory Jacobs – producer
• Jason Hoffs – producer
• Dion Beebe – cinematographer
• Oliver Scholl – production designer
• Kate Hawley – costume designer
• James Herbert – editor
• Laura Jennings – editor
• Christophe Beck – composer
• Nick Davis – visual effects supervisor

Production

Development and writing

Viz Media published All You Need Is Kill in North America in 2009 as one of four translated Japanese science fiction novels that initiated its Haikasoru imprint. After drawing the interest of producer Erwin Stoff, his company 3 Arts Entertainment optioned the novel that same year. 3 Arts collaborated with the publisher's filmmaking subsidiary Viz Productions, headed by Jason Hoffs. Viz Media president Hidemi Fukuhara served as executive producer. Instead of making a pitch to a major studio to purchase the property and proceed with writing and producing a film adaptation, the company developed a spec script to show the studios. Stoff approached writer Dante Harper and sent him a copy of the novel. Harper found the book "too complex" to properly adapt, but, despite the prospect of not getting paid, he chose to "risk it" and accepted the job, taking eight months to write the script. Upon completion, Warner Bros. purchased it in a $3 million deal in April 2010. The studio hired Doug Liman to direct the film the following August. Harper's screenplay was listed in the 2010 edition of the Black List, a survey of most-liked unproduced screenplays.

In June 2011, Joby Harold was hired to rework the screenplay. By September, Warner approached Brad Pitt to star; after he declined, the studio then approached Tom Cruise. Once Cruise accepted, the script changed the age of the leading role to fit the actors. In December 2011, Cruise officially joined the film. Emily Blunt entered negotiations to star opposite Cruise in April 2012. Screenwriting duo Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman also delivered a draft of their own.

Six months before filming started, Liman discarded two-thirds of Harper's original script. Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth were hired to rewrite the script. Screenwriter Simon Kinberg took over from the Butterworths, and eight weeks before the start of filming, he was replaced by Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie was introduced to the project while directing Cruise in Jack Reacher. While reading the earlier script McQuarrie "understood very clearly what the premise of the story was and what they were looking for in terms of characters". Even if the previous scripts were darker, Cruise stressed the importance of the story's humor to McQuarrie. The actor compared Cage's violent demises to Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, declaring, "It's fun coming up with new ways to kill yourself."

The screenplay did not yet have a satisfactory ending, and, despite the producers and studio executives worried about starting filming without a set conclusion, Liman opted to finish the script during principal photography. McQuarrie at one point suggested adding a twist involving the Mimics figuring out Cage's attack on Paris and resetting time during his strike, but discarded it as "you were so exhausted by the time you got to that point." Eventually, McQuarrie considered that focusing on the comedic aspects meant "it needed to end in a way that wasn't harsh", and thus opted to end the plot where it started, on the helicopter bringing Cage to London, fulfilling the notion that "comedies generally have to go back to the way things were".

Filming

Production began at Leavesden Studios near London, which Warner Brothers had purchased as a permanent studio site. WB had been renting space there for its production of the Harry Potter films, but had been leaving the sets up permanently for nearly a decade and eventually chose to make the site semi-permanent. The parts with Tom Cruise in the opening scene were filmed in Liman's editing room, with the actor doing his own make-up and hair, leading the director to say it "may be the most independent thing I've ever done." Though Liman intended to film the beach battle on location, the studio instead had a beach set built at the studio site. The set was surrounded by chroma key green screens, which the visual effects artists later used to extend the beach with plates shot at Saunton Sands in North Devon. It was intended for the battle scenes to be reminiscent of coastal battles during World War II such as the Invasion of Normandy and the Battle of Dunkirk.

Principal photography began at Leavesden on October 1, 2012. The Los Angeles Times said on the second day, Liman "demanded a total reshoot of everything filmed on Day 1", which concerned producers. Filming on the beach set was scheduled to last two weeks, but extended to nearly three months due to what the Los Angeles Times called "the director's self-described 'workshop-y' filming style". Filming also took place in Trafalgar Square in London on Saturday November 24, 2012. The square was closed to the public, and tanks were brought in to film the action scenes. The brief scene in the Square required closing 36 roads, diverting 122 bus routes and booking all available rooms in nearby hotels and a costly restoration of a historic wicket at a local cricket ground after one of the production helicopters knocked it over. A former army base in the village of Barton Stacey in Hampshire was also used as a filming location for two weeks. Filming also took place at Essex & Suffolk former water treatment facilities in Hanningfield, Essex.

Liman said filming took place seven days a week using two crews to film 20 days in addition to what had originally been scheduled. The crew struggled with changeable British weather since the film was supposed to be set in one day and had to maintain the same weather. The indoor beach set also became muddy, requiring the effects artists to enhance the environment with digital sand and surf. Though filming concluded by August 2013, actor Jeremy Piven was added to the cast and extra scenes including him were filmed; ultimately, however, Piven did not appear in the finished film. Cinematographer Dion Beebe made his first feature film with Liman, with whom he had worked previously on commercials. Beebe's approach was to develop "a world under siege, but not a bleak, dark, post-apocalyptic landscape"; Beebe preferred to avoid the saturated bleach bypass look. 35 mm film was used instead of digital cameras to evoke the World War II footage that provided inspiration for the battle scenes.

Battle suits

Production designer Oliver Scholl and his team worked with lead builder Pierre Bohanna to develop concept art for several battle suit options based on contemporary, real-world powered exoskeleton initiatives, such as those supported by DARPA. When director Doug Liman chose a design, the team built an aluminum prototype frame that had pivot points and hinges. Costume designer Kate Hawley contributed a gritty aesthetic design for the color palettes and surface treatments. While the design was meant to be utilitarian, it was also created so the actors could be seen in the suits and also run in them. The team created a foam mock-up of Tom Cruise so the frame could be tailored for him. The team handcrafted 70 hard material and 50 soft material battle suits in the course of almost five months. There were three versions of the battle suits: "grunts, dogs, and tanks". The battle suit for Blunt's character was given red slash marks "as if to say she had been to hell and back and lived to tell about it."

Cruise, known for performing his own film stunts, also did so in Edge of Tomorrow. Both he and Blunt wore the heavy metal suits. The battle suits weighed 85 pounds (39 kg) on average; the heavier versions weighed around 130 pounds (59 kg) due to being equipped with a mock sniper rifle and rocket launcher. Blunt trained three months for her role, "focusing on everything from weights to sprints to yoga, aerial wire work and gymnastics", and studying the Israeli combat system Krav Maga.

Each actor needed four people to help put on the battle suit. Initially, Cruise needed 30 minutes to put on the suit and another 30 minutes to remove it. Ultimately, the time was reduced to 30 seconds. Between takes, the actors would be suspended by chains from iron frames to take the weight of the suits off their shoulders.

Visual effects
Nine companies handled the visual effects for Edge of Tomorrow under VFX supervisor Nick Davis. Davis worked with the crew of The Third Floor on the film's previsualization process. Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI) worked on the first two acts of the film and created over 400 shots, including photorealistic environments, battle scenes, and computer-generated creatures and characters. One major shot involved covering London Heathrow Airport with military troops, vehicles, and aircraft; SPI split some of the work with RodeoFX. Cinesite joined late in the production and developed 221 shots for ten key sequences, with 189 appearing in the final cut.

A monster with various tentacle-like limbs in a beach.
An Alpha during the beach battle. The design for the extraterrestrial race aimed to be as otherworldly as possible, with a body consisting mostly of tentacles built out of obsidian-like shards.
Designers created the alien Mimics to look different from any terrestrial animal. Davis and Liman favored an early model composed primarily of tentacles. SPI's Dan Kramer described its appearance as "heavy black spaghetti" and noted that the modelers faced a challenge creating the tentacled creatures. A technical animator created an Autodesk Maya plugin that made the movement of each tentacle independent. Since Liman did not want the Mimics to look "too organic or terrestrial", Imageworks' artists devised the idea of making the aliens out of an obsidian-like material, "basically a glass that could cut". Various debris was incorporated within the tentacles to give the creature a sense of weight and fast movement. The Alphas were given a definable head area to show their status as more sentient, while receiving a different color and a bigger size compared to the Mimic grunts. Cinesite created the mechanical Mimics used in the training areas, while MPC created the Omega in a digital environment into which the effects artists composited underwater footage filmed at Leavesden's water tank.

Animators created digital versions of the battle suits, at times with the soldiers inside them. On the set, a 3D scanner booth digitized the actors, while hand scanners captured the textures of the practical suits. Imageworks received pieces of the suits for reference. The company's library of reflection data on various materials helped enhance the armor's shading. SPI's crew created the base at Heathrow by merging the set at Leavesden with digitally altered footage from the airport; the film's dropships, barracks and mess halls replaced the existing aircraft. Framestore created the digital Paris and recreated it with photomodeling from three days of visits. Given that the city is a no-fly zone, Framestore's artists obtained their aerial images by climbing an 80-meter crane parked in the Louvre courtyard. The quadcopter dropships were based on the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey that can tilt its rotors to fly as either planes or helicopters, while having a design closer to the Quad TiltRotor. Aside from the crashed ship on the beachhead and a gimbal set to depict the plane used by Cage's squad, the film used digital models for most ships. The computer-generated dropships had some of Imageworks' heaviest detail given the proximity of the actors to the aircraft in the camp scenes; the effects artists wanted to make sure the ships broke apart realistically during the crashes.

Prime Focus World converted the film into 3D in post-production using the same tools for the stereoscopy as in World War Z and Gravity. The company made use of scans of the cast's faces from film production while vendor Nvizible helped the company convert the hologram table used by Dr Carter.

Music

Main article: Edge of Tomorrow: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Composer Christophe Beck was a late addition to the film, taking over from Ramin Djawadi, who was Liman's first choice to replace his frequent collaborator John Powell, as Powell was on sabbatical. Edge of Tomorrow marked Beck's first science fiction film score. To prepare, Beck watched the film with temp tracks, including one from the 2012 film Battleship. He experimented with repeating the music with the scenes, but because this approach did not frequently fit the events on the screen, Beck used minimal repetition in the film. "The day is reset dozens of times in the film and it would get very repetitive to approach that musically the same way every time", Beck recalled. He initially tried for "traditional heroic themes" that involved horns and trumpets, but he said Liman "preferred a non-traditional approach, driven by percussion and distorted orchestra". To that end, Beck used the pizzicato playing technique, "not in the traditional, plinky-plinky-isn't-this-funny way, but a little darker, and always accompanied by some higher concept synth colors". The distorted orchestral samples enhanced the comedic tone of the extended.