I fully understand how it would be easy, at first glance, to dismiss this movie as just another one of the forgettable, CGI-drenched blockbusters that Hollywood churns out each summer. In the poster, Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt stand poised in futuristic exoskeleton-cum-battle-suits with war raging behind them. His forearms bristle with large-caliber weaponry; she slings an outsized, cleaver-like sword over her shoulder. They look into the distance with grim determination. The title, Edge of Tomorrow, is typical of these sorts of movies—vaguely epic, but essentially meaningless once you stop and think about it. Nevertheless, it’s not hard to guess how the story will unfold. Our handsome hero will fight a war with the nifty, advanced technology of an imagined future. Emily Blunt will pay her Hollywood dues as the secondary female comrade. The two of them will probably start out at odds, then find common ground and work together. It looks like they’ll save the world. Probably from aliens.
The thing is, that’s all pretty much correct. The impression we get from the poster isn’t so much inaccurate as incomplete. Only the tagline, “Live. Die. Repeat.”—which is, for some reason, more prominently displayed than the title[i]—hints at the time-travel antics and wry, winking tone that make this movie exceptional. It’s no great masterpiece like The Godfather, but it is a great summer blockbuster: exciting, solidly acted and cleverly written, not to mention smarter and more emotionally resonant that it initially appears.
None of which will come as a surprise to those familiar with director Doug Liman, who’s been a skilled cinematic showman throughout his career, from early cult classics like Swingers and Go to the action flicks that he has mostly made since. Sometimes his movies work (The Bourne Identity, Fair Game, or the recent American Made), sometimes not so much (Jumper, Mr. and Mrs. Smith), but Liman always makes the screen crackle with an infectious verve and energy. His enthusiasm and lightness of touch are perfectly suited to a movie like Edge of Tomorrow, with its frequent, often darkly comic battle sequences and its tongue-in-cheek vision of the near future. Working with an engaging screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, and with lively visuals by cinematographer Dion Beebe and editors James Herbert and Laura Jennings, Liman continually finds entertaining new dimensions in this twisty sci-fi story.
Even in the initial exposition—related via a newsreel montage of general calamity and the pronouncements of a brusque Irish general (Brendan Gleeson) in the first scene—there are indications that Edge of Tomorrow is not just another mindless blockbuster. Start with the alien invaders, first glimpsed in the vividly hectic battle sequence that rounds out the opening half hour. Dubbed ‘Mimics’ for their uncanny ability to anticipate our actions, they’re tough, merciless, and refreshingly bizarre—typically visible as little more than whirling, seething masses of tentacles, with heads and legs vaguely discernible on the rare occasions when they stand still. While perhaps not truly frightening, they’re genuinely convincing as an existential threat to humanity, emerging from underground burrows and zipping lethally around the battlefield; it takes a great deal of firepower to kill even one of them, and their shape-shifting limbs quickly decimate entire squads. Indeed, the writers seem to have conceived the Mimics with the explicit goal of silencing skeptics. Don’t believe that the nations of the world would band together in fairly uncomplicated fashion, with every able-bodied human desperately needed for the war effort? Check out these monstrosities—if we’re ever going to create a ‘United Defense Force’ (UDF), this is what it would take. Just to hammer the point home, the Mimics have landed in Germany and quickly steamrolled most of mainland Europe. The conflict is never given a name, but it might as well be called ‘The Perfectly Unquestionable War of Self-Defense.’
Things aren’t looking good for humanity, but we join the story at a pivotal, relatively hopeful moment. New weapons (those badass exoskeletons) have given our troops a fighting chance, and some have even mastered them to the point of becoming true super-soldiers. Chief among them is Blunt’s Sergeant Rita Vrataski, whose heroics have led to a crucial, improbable victory at Verdun,[ii] buying time for a retreat across the English Channel. At the outset, the UDF is preparing to launch a massive, last-ditch counterattack—landing on the Normandy beaches, no less!—and Sergeant Vrataski has become an icon, lionized in the media as the ‘Angel of Verdun’ and known to the rank and file by the half-derogatory, half-admiring, very semantically satisfying moniker ‘Full Metal Bitch.’
And if you still find yourself thinking, “Okay, that all sounds fun, but… Tom Cruise, really?”—well, I’m right there with you. I’m definitely against him as a human being, and pretty torn on him as an actor. He’s almost always an engaging screen presence, but it can be hard to tell if you’re actually watching a good performance, or simply appreciating the fact that he’s so clearly giving it everything he’s got.[iii] The wonderful thing about Edge of Tomorrow is that you don’t need to like him—indeed, Liman almost seems to be banking on the fact that many people don’t.
Cruise plays Major William Cage, a smooth-talking military PR officer leading the effort to drum up public support for the impending attack, and at the beginning, he’s thoroughly unlikable: vain, self-absorbed, and a coward to boot. He’s happy to look pretty and project confidence on TV, convincing millions of people to enlist in a war against a near-invincible enemy, but he balks at the idea of going anywhere near combat himself. When Gleeson’s General Brigham assigns him to film the landings in France (only mildly dangerous, since the beach appears to be undefended) he dodges, flashes a million-dollar smile, and does everything he can to wheedle his way out of it. Whatever Cruise’s limits as an actor, he excels at this sort of thing, and it’s worth pausing for a moment over that smile. It’s central to some of his best roles (Magnolia, Jerry Maguire) and one of the keys to his overall success—a strange but beguiling mix of sleaze and genuine charisma. Anyone can see that there’s manipulation behind that smile, yet you can understand how people would still fall for it. It’s a perfect fit for a character like Cage—the confident grin of a man who has coasted through life mostly on his good looks and his ability to charm and disarm. (In a satisfying dig at a few other deserving targets, we learn that before the war, he was an ad executive from New Jersey.) It’s not as if no other actor could have played this role well, but Cruise’s presence dovetails perfectly with the cheekily self-aware tone that makes the movie work.
This is still a summer blockbuster, so we know that Cage will eventually learn his lessons, become a better man, and rise to the occasion. After an ill-advised attempt to blackmail his way out of combat, he finds himself stripped of his rank, thrown in with the grunts of J Squad, and dropped, in a dizzying single take, out of a troop transport and into battle. He’s completely ineffectual, but he manages, mostly through dumb luck, to kill the Mimic that massacres the rest of the squad. In a lesser movie, this would be his wake-up call, and he’d quickly acquire a sense of duty, master the battle suit, and generally become a skilled and honorable soldier—all in time to single-handedly turn the tide and save the day. But wait, now a half-dozen more Mimics are gathering nearby… maybe they won’t notice him? That would be a little hard to believe. But nope, the big blue one sees him! He has the presence of mind to grab a claymore and blow its face off, but—yikes, now his own face is a mess, and apparently Mimic blood corrodes like acid. Until a movie finally goes there, you don’t realize how rare it is to see an A-list leading man like Cruise die painfully onscreen, and Liman has fun lingering for several nasty seconds on the blood burning through Cage’s face and liquefying his brain—just to remove any lingering doubts that, yes, this guy really is dead.
Then Cage wakes up back at the base as if from a bad dream, and we have the movie’s central conceit: he’s trapped in a time loop, doomed to live the day of the battle over and over again. And this trippy-est of sci-fi plot devices has the welcome effect of making Cage’s character arc, and the story in general, a great deal more convincing. The UDF really does have no chance on that beach, and Cage doesn’t magically become a super-soldier in the course of a single battle. If a clumsy coward like him is eventually going to do his duty and help save the world, it makes sense that he’d have to be dragged kicking and screaming into it. It’s the perfect role for the polarizing, sometimes overly ingratiating Cruise; those who like him still get to watch him carry the movie and do the action-star stuff, while those who hate him get to point out that he becomes a hero only when all other options have been exhausted, and watch him die dozens of times along the way.
The time-loop gimmick is also central to the movie’s sense of humor, allowing Liman to eschew the kind of trite solemnity that often pervades big blockbusters when the fate of the world is at stake. (Think of the two needlessly dour Matrix sequels, which had eye-popping action galore but lacked the original’s anarchic sense of fun.) Cage’s first death is shocking in both senses (graphic and unexpected), but once dying has become a mere minor setback, Liman is free to stage most of the subsequent deaths with a healthy dose of slapstick comedy. He puts Cruise through quite a gauntlet; Cage is crushed, drowned, blown up, slashed by Mimic tentacles, run over by large vehicles in two different contexts, and, once he begins his ‘training,’ repeatedly clobbered by whirling Mimic simulators and unceremoniously put down by an impatient Rita Vrataski. It’s amusing, and even becomes rather profound as the deaths keep piling up. Viewed a certain way, Edge of Tomorrow is an oddly powerful meditation on the absurd, arbitrary brutality of war—to survive, you need either incredible luck or an unlimited number of chances to get it exactly right.
This setup is hardly original; several other recent movies have put their protagonists through similar existential wringers. The most obvious parallels are with thrillers like Déjà Vu and its much-better, criminally lesser-known cousin Source Code, which sees Jake Gyllenhaal trapped on a doomed commuter train until he can identify the terrorist who blows it up. In spirit, however, the closest companion to Edge of Tomorrow is probably Harold Ramis’s classic comedy Groundhog Day. The settings are wildly different, but both movies feature an arrogant protagonist forced to relive the same day until he learns not to be a selfish asshole. Liman wisely doesn’t try to hide this, opting instead to be cleverly self-aware about Edge of Tomorrow’s relationship to its obvious antecedent. A clear example is the way the two movies signal the day starting over. Bill Murray, effortlessly magnetic even when acting like a jerk, wakes up in a cozy bedroom to a soothing Sonny & Cher ballad. Tom Cruise, somewhat grating even when he’s doing his utmost to be magnetic, gets a literal kick in the ass and a drill sergeant in his face, yelling, “On your feet, maggot!”
Liman also follows Groundhog Day’s fine example by not getting too bogged down in time-travel mechanics. Ramis recognized that such explication wasn’t necessary for his story, and didn’t offer any. Liman can’t quite get away with that, but he knows that the movie’s appeal doesn’t lie in the specifics of how the time loop works. He gets most of the explanation out of the way in a few efficient scenes, mostly from the mouth of a dotty scientist played by Noah Taylor, who unfortunately isn’t given much else to do.[iv] Even here, Liman doesn’t push too hard; Taylor’s Dr. Carter simply tells Cage that there’s an ‘Omega’ hidden somewhere, which constitutes, along with those big blue ‘Alphas,’ the central nervous system for all the Mimic drones. It’s the standard Achilles heel of invincible alien invaders—destroy it, and we win the war. Cage got that blue blood into his veins the first time he died, so now he can reset the day, because, well, “The Omega has the ability to control time.” Even when sci-fi movies do flood us with esoteric terms, inventing whole branches of pseudoscience to make things sound plausible, the exposition essentially boils down to the same thing: this is just how it is. Suspend your disbelief and let’s get back to the fun stuff.
Taylor may get stuck with a largely functional role, but not so for the other supporting actors, most of whom play Cage’s sardonic J Squad comrades. Liman and the screenwriters take care to give them at least rudimentary personalities, and find ample humor in their increasing confusion as Cage learns more and more about them, while they keep meeting him for the first time. The mostly unknown actors have fun with their hammy dialogue, and everyone gets at least one laugh line. Tony Way gets several of them as the archetypal overweight slob, and those who recognize her will be amused to see Charlotte Riley, best known for embodying the upper-class English charm of bygone eras, clearly enjoying herself as a scrappy, foul-mouthed grunt. (At one point, she even gets to grin at Cruise and yell, “Hah! Jinx, bitch!”) The late Bill Paxton probably has the most fun of all as an uptight, built-Ford-tough platoon sergeant, spouting southern-fried platitudes about the glory of combat that evoke militaristic philosophies of the early 20th century.
Such sentiments aren’t just amusing characterization; they’re central to the appeal of the movie’s imagined future. The outlook for the human race may be grim, but Liman’s inclination to keep things lighthearted leads him to imagine humanity in a way that rings weirdly true. The soldiers of J Squad (and, by extension, the rest of the UDF) aren’t terrified conscripts; they’re fully and enthusiastically immersed in the military mindset: the human race on all-out war footing. Assuming the pre-war world was as morally murky as ours is now, it makes sense that they might find the simplicity of the situation perversely refreshing. Faced with the prospect of annihilation, humankind hasn’t just united, but morphed into a slightly brasher, more cocksure version of itself. They almost seem to be relishing the role of the underdog: if we win, it’ll be a truly epic triumph; if we lose, at least we’ll go down swinging. Either way, the choice is clear: get out there and kick some Mimic ass. This is the world of all sorts of punk-inflected sci-fi, especially video games and comic books (the screenplay is adapted from a Japanese graphic novel with the delightfully barefaced title All You Need Is Kill) and Liman imbues the movie with a heightened-reality vibe that echoes such influences.
One of these parallels is particularly striking. Even among other time-loop protagonists, Cage is uniquely similar to a whole other category of fictional characters who find themselves temporally imprisoned, even when their stories don’t revolve around it. I’m talking, of course, about video game avatars. It might seem like a stretch to compare these controllable masses of pixels to the richer, more autonomous characters of traditional fiction, but as technological advances have made games ever more impressively photorealistic, the line has become increasingly blurred. The biggest contemporary video games feature settings at least as vividly detailed—and characters as intricately expressive—as those of early 3D-animated movies, and the scale of the creative enterprise has grown in concert, with crews, budgets, and revenues often rivaling those of the biggest movies.[v] The stories have a mostly deserved reputation for being lazy and hackneyed, but most games do have a narrative framework, and game developers, equipped with ever-improving visual tools (and faced with ever-rising financial stakes) have increasingly invested creative resources in sophisticated narratives, decent dialogue, and complex characters—sometimes including top-tier actors to supply their voices.[vi] I’m no expert on video games, but as they continue to proliferate, diversify, and be taken more seriously as works of art, the similarities with other creative industries are striking. Game categories increasingly resemble those of film; the big, action-focused blockbusters look amazing and offer simple escapist thrills, but rarely have much of a soul, while scrappy ‘indie’ games are less dazzling, but make up for it by being smarter, wittier, and more emotionally stimulating.[vii] And we haven’t even touched on the now-ubiquitous practice of adapting movies into video games, and vice versa.
My point is simply that there is a considerable and increasing amount of overlap between movies and video games, especially the big action blockbusters of both mediums. The world of Edge of Tomorrow could easily be that of a first-person shooter—the Omega even functions as the requisite ‘end boss’—and the story makes the same demands of Cage that we make of our avatars. Welcome to the world! Now charge into the chaos of war. Die a violent death. Now do it again. (On your feet, maggot!) In the second act, Cage and Rita work, through lethal trial and error, to plot a survivable course through the battle, which is exactly what the player does in a game set to the highest (i.e. most realistic) difficulty. This is something that older generations often don’t seem to understand about the appeal of difficult games; it’s not just about killing and blowing stuff up, but about learning from your mistakes and mastering a sequence of actions: turn here, take cover there, get that one, move before that one sees you—over and over until you make it through alive. And for as long as digital avatars have looked even mildly realistic, artists have imbued them with human consciousness and imagined the tragicomic results. In fact, an entirely new video art form has arisen over the past twenty years, in which players record certain points of view in multiplayer games, effectively turning them into cameras. The multiplayer map becomes the set; the other avatars, plus recorded voiceovers, become the actors. Known by the unwieldy term ‘machinima,’ these stories are usually quite amateurish and juvenile, but the best among them imagine the inner lives of the avatars with genuine insight and humor.[viii]
Working with flesh-and-blood actors rather than pixels, Liman explores how a more recognizably human character might be affected by the mind-bending absurdity of such an existence. And it truly is mind-bending; one of the hidden pleasures of Edge of Tomorrow is letting your imagination run wild with the implications of the time loop. The movie encourages such speculation; no sooner have we wrapped our heads around Cage’s predicament than Liman starts messing with our newly adjusted sense of time and scale. In a crucial early scene, Cage saves Rita from incoming fire, and as he kills a few Mimics with practiced efficiency, we realize along with her: he’s done this before. In almost every subsequent scene until Cage loses his power, Liman repeats the gimmick, dropping sly and frequently entertaining hints that although we’re seeing this part of the story for the first time, Cage has been here many times already. We quickly lose track of how many times Cage has lived and died, and Liman refuses to give us even a vague indication of the total number. Indeed, there’s no guarantee of continuity even within individual scenes; whenever a conversation or sequence of actions reaches a halfway plausible endpoint, the next thing we see could be many loops further down the line. The images we see aren’t a sequential story so much as a highlight reel lifted from hundreds—if not thousands—of iterations of the same journey. Cruise does a fine job of imagining what the effects might be; an almost imperceptible sag comes into his shoulders, and his face hardens into a grim mask as frustration gives way to resignation. The fact that Cage’s experience so far outstrips our understanding also makes the incremental rewiring of his personality all the more believable. Even as he becomes numb to death and destruction—he probably sees more of it than any other person in history—he’s inevitably growing closer to the people who are his only company in the midst of it, and whom he has to watch die every day.
None more so, of course, than Rita. The arc of their relationship is formulaic, but relatively plausible for multiple reasons, and Liman handles her character in refreshing, even subversive ways. Well, mostly. Three repetitions of that shot of her rising up in slow motion from a yoga pose is probably overkill, but you can understand the inclination. It’s a remarkable image, and one that says something about the movie’s attitude: even here, at the moment that most plainly objectifies Rita in the way action movies so often do to women, she’s attractive in a way that’s as much impressive as seductive. This is still Emily Blunt playing her, so Rita is gorgeous to an improbable degree, but she’s also strong and athletic enough that her in-story reputation remains credible. That is to say, she’s entirely convincing as a super-soldier who happens to be as gorgeous as Emily Blunt—still the kind of coincidence that happens only in movies, but she looks the part in a way that such characters rarely do.
She’s allowed to act the part as well. That thrice-repeated shot is easy to roll your eyes at, but it’s in slow motion for a reason: it’s the split second of simple curiosity when she first sees Cage, before reality and her personality kick in, and she greets him with undisguised contempt: “Who said you could talk to me??” The movie even allows her to play that icy demeanor for laughs, something only men are typically allowed to do. The one person who actually calls her by her vulgar nickname gets a turbocharged punch to the gut, and the one time Cage does bring up sex, her response is exactly what I presume most women envision for men who won’t take a hint. The dynamic between them is (mostly) a subtle inversion of the usual one between male and female leads in action movies; this time she’s the reticent, battle-hardened veteran subjecting the new recruit to brutal training regimens and instilling the values of duty and self-sacrifice.
She even gets to be—in a subtle, roundabout way—the real hero of the movie. The story is centered on Cage’s redemption, but if you think about it, Rita’s journey is far wilder and more impressive. Prior to their meeting, she spends an indeterminate amount of time as the only person on earth to have gone through the craziest experience in human history. She’s the only soldier in the UDF who truly understands the enemy they’re fighting, and as such, the only one who can formulate and carry out the near-suicidal plan that has a chance of winning the war. She has to charge into a battle that she’s virtually certain will be a massacre, while at the same time staying on the lookout (then and throughout the preceding 24 hours) for someone else who’s stumbled into the time loop. And she has to be mentally prepared to play her part at any point in the plan’s progression, while knowing that she’ll only actually experience a few possible outcomes: a slaughter on the beach, or an epic journey to kill the Omega. In either case, she’s unlikely to survive. If she does, then all she’ll probably ever know about her part in saving the world will be a story told to her by someone she’s just met. Just try to imagine her radical state of mind as the battle approaches; how beautifully apt that she trains by balancing on one hand amid giant spinning blades.
Not to mention her emotional state; along with the near-certainty of imminent death, she has to be ready to meet and work with a stranger who already knows her very well. Here again, the time-loop premise makes the movie’s adherence to blockbuster conventions feel less arbitrary and more honestly earned. As tough and withdrawn as Rita is, it makes sense that she might open up somewhat to Cage; having been in the time loop herself, she understands that they’ve already spent countless days together. And while Liman doesn’t completely eschew the genre-prescribed romantic element, he notably downplays it. Cage falls in love with Rita because she’s beautiful and a straightforwardly admirable person, but his deep emotional attachment to her is more rooted in the intensely harrowing experience that they go through together. When Rita does kiss him, it’s a gesture not so much of romantic attraction as of respect for his bravery and gratitude for his assistance—the quick and perfunctory farewell of two warriors who know they’re about to die.
As such, it’s of a piece with the sequence it takes place in. The endings of time-loop stories are always tricky—even the excellent Source Code struggled to come up with an emotionally satisfying resolution that also made logical sense. The climactic showdown in Edge of Tomorrow certainly isn’t perfect; only a couple of J Squad grunts get a proper resolution, while the heroes, so realistically mortal beforehand, become more conventionally damage-proof once Cage is out of the loop. But the sequence is agreeably efficient and straightforward for an action blockbuster, and does a surprisingly good job of holding to the story’s internal logic. Meanwhile, Liman handles it with his usual panache; the action is lively and coherent, while the flooded, abandoned Louvre and Tuileries Gardens have a bleak and arresting beauty.
Nor does the movie overstay its welcome with extravagant scenes of celebration once the world is saved. Cage lands in London amid ringing church bells, watches a brief news report on TV, and just like that, he’s on his way to the place we know this scene is headed. He sees that J Squad is still alive, then walks into the training center to find Rita, who of course greets him just as coldly as she always has. In one final satisfying moment in a movie full of them, Liman leaves the interaction that follows up to our imagination. Cage just chuckles, and for once there’s no obvious manipulation behind that smile; he’s simply thrilled that a person he’s come to admire and care about isn’t dead after all. And when someone is that genuinely delighted onscreen, their happiness is inevitably contagious.
Even if that person is Tom Cruise. ◊
© Harrison Swan, 2019
[i] This was supposedly considered for the actual title right up until the last minute, then seized upon as a sort of alternate title in the studio’s attempts to re-brand the movie for home release after it performed badly at the American box office (as so many of the best ones do). The DVD release just went ahead and used both in concert, yielding the terrifically nonsensical title Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow.
[ii] Yes, that Verdun—the threat of the ‘Mimic scourge’ is such that it must be likened to the antagonist of not one, but both World Wars. It also confuses the allegory in subtly humorous ways; the Mimics are a merciless force of pure destruction, but maybe they’ve started this conflict due to fears of strategic encirclement, and the breakdown of a convoluted galactic alliance system.
[iii] My favorite assessment of his acting comes from Christopher Orr’s review of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation: “You don’t overcome the ‘impossible’ by thinking it over a little more carefully… You overcome the impossible through the application of sheer, unvarnished willpower, a quality that Cruise has always possessed in abundance. Other performers might cry more persuasively, for instance, than Cruise did at Jason Robards’ bedside in Magnolia, but none will cry harder. Others may juke more gracefully in their underwear than Cruise did in Risky Business; none will juke with greater conviction.”
[iv] Taylor looks the part and delivers his lines well, as always, but I’ve found him much more compelling when he takes his eccentric demeanor in more sinister directions—most famously as the loathsome mercenary Locke, who cut off Jaime Lannister’s hand in Game of Thrones.
[v] For example, the latest Call of Duty game made $500 million the weekend of its release, and surpassed $1 billion within two months. Meanwhile, the video game industry as a whole grossed a staggering $74 billion worldwide in 2015, and continues to grow.
[vi] This trend is, of course, hardly universal; some older games—the Legend of Zelda, Deus Ex, and Thief come to mind—are known for their compelling storylines, while many contemporary games are as narratively vapid as ever. For interesting (and hilarious) commentary on all this, check out the Zero Punctuation YouTube series by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, a motormouthed, flamboyantly profane British critic who articulately skewers weak narratives in his often scathing reviews of new games.
[vii] One of the most widely acclaimed games of all time, for example, is Portal, a bare-bones puzzle game with plain graphics and an impish sense of humor, in which the player uses a portal-generating gun to move through spaces that they otherwise couldn’t. I’ve heard of sniper simulators that take place in real time, so you might have to wait hours for the chance to land an almost impossibly difficult shot, and entirely text-based games about depression and suicide so shattering that they reduce the player to an emotional wreck. The cleverest indie game that I’m aware of is Papers, Please, in which you play an immigration officer at a checkpoint in a drab, fictional Eastern-bloc country, and must review paperwork for an endless parade of immigrants and returning citizens. You gain points for following the increasingly heartless and convoluted laws, and lose points for bending the rules or mistakenly letting in political undesirables.
[viii] As teenagers, my friends and I watched countless episodes of the best-known machinima series, Red vs. Blue, which turned the armored avatars of the Halo games into characters in a M.A.S.H.-esque sitcom. Stranded in concrete bunkers at opposite ends of a desolate box canyon, the lazy, dim-witted, and otherwise inept grunts in the eponymous armies have no incentive to actually fight each other, and spend most of their time the way real-life soldiers do: bickering and goofing off in an attempt to stave off boredom. The humor is often crass and immature in the ways one might expect from the gamer crowd, but when it’s good, it reaches impressive heights of screwball comedy and absurdist satire. When the Red and Blue squads each receive a new recruit, their separate attempts at hazing spiral out of control in classic sitcom fashion. The onboard computer in a massive tank asks to be called ‘Sheila’ and grows increasingly sassy as the story progresses. A mute soldier on the Red team turns out to be an android with a missing speech unit; he gets a new one and it promptly short-circuits, causing him to speak only in flat, robotic Spanish. And when one recruit asks why the flag at the base (the object of the ‘Capture the Flag’ multiplayer mode) is so important, his superiors falter: “Because it’s the flag, man… It’s blue, we’re blue…” A fantastic layman’s introduction to the series and to machinima more generally can be found in this rather charmingly dated article from 2005: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/magazine/the-xbox-auteurs.html
ReWatch List 