Comic Con: Edge of Tomorrow panel, with Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton!

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

EDGE OF TOMORROW was certainly the most mysterious offering from Warner Bros. today in Hall H. We haven’t seen much from the film, just a few images. Heck, it just got a new title. (It was formerly known as ALL YOU NEED IS KILL, which it shares with the Japanese novel it is based on.) But they brought attention to the film in style by having Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, writer Christopher McQuarrie and director Doug Liman show us the first trailer. Oh, Bill Paxton was there too, but we’ll get to him later.

In the film, a hive-like alien race, called Mimics, have hit the Earth in an unrelenting assault, shredding great cities to rubble and leaving millions of human casualties in their wake. Cruise plays Lt. Col. Bill Cage, an officer who has never seen a day of combat when he is unceremoniously demoted and then dropped–untrained and ill-equipped–into what amounts to little more than a suicide mission. Cage is killed within minutes, managing to take an Alpha down with him. But, impossibly, he awakens back at the beginning of the same hellish day, and is forced to fight and die again… and again. Direct physical contact with the alien has thrown him into a time loop– dooming him to live out the same brutal combat over and over.

Not unlike GROUNDHOG’S DAY, Cage can remember everything that happened the day before, but to everyone else – like a very buff Emily Blunt – it’s just the first time that day is happening.

The trailer makes EDGE OF TOMORROW look like a gritty sci-fi film in the vein of DISTRICT 9 and ELYSIUM. Lots of dusty action and and mechanized body suits. The premise is hard to decipher, unfortunately. I had the luck to know what it was about beforehand, but if you didn’t know, it would look mystifying, I imagine. It’s a pretty far-out concept which also brings to mind SOURCE CODE. (To its credit, ALL YOU NEED IS KILL came out several years before SOURCE CODE.)

Here are the highlights from the panel:

– Cruise seemed very happy to be there; he starting singing “I Want to Know What Love is” at the very beginning of the panel.

– Interestingly, Cruise not playing a heroic type in this film, at least not at first. Cruise said he’s a guy who has had a very “easy war.” He’s a PR guy who is thrust into the war, and he’s scared and unsure. Liman said it was really cool to watch Cruise in a role like this, which is pretty much the opposite of what we’re used to seeing.

– They hinted at a lot of comedic elements in the film, although none of that was shown in the trailer, which looked rather grim. Apparently it has a “perverse sense of humor.” Cruise is also apparently quite funny in it.

– Cruise complimented McQuarrie’s “complex” script; the writer apparently made it look easy.

– Emily Blunt learned gymnastics and weight-training for her character, who looks really toned based on the footage. She and Cruise were in the gym every day at 5am. They had to wear these mechanized suits, which you can see in the picture. Their personalities completely changed when they had the suits on, evidently they became really ornery. (They’re incredibly heavy, according to the them.) Cruise was very impressed with how prepared Blunt was for the film, physically.

– At one point, Cruise called out Bill Paxton, who was in the audience. (He plays a tough military type in the film.) Hardwick had Paxton come up on stage and join them. Crowd went wild – especially after he quoted ALIENS (“Game over, man!”) and WEIRD SCIENCE at Cruise’s urging.

I must say, that last part was one of the highlights of the Con for this longtime Paxton fan. Watch it below!