One bad moment in Edge of Tomorrow involving a kiss between Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt makes zero sense. An adaptation of the Japanese light novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, Edge of Tomorrow (sometimes titled Live Die Repeat) is commonly described as a combination of Groundhog Day and Starship Troopers. While well-reviewed and relatively successful with audiences, Edge of Tomorrow does, unfortunately, have one scene that just doesn’t work.
Cruise plays William Cage, a United Defense Force public relations officer with no combat experience who is thrust onto the front lines against an alien invasion of Europe. The cowardly, incompetent protagonist finds himself reliving the same day over and over again and gradually becomes an almost literal killing machine. Meanwhile, Rita Vrataski (Blunt) is the real alpha character, a celebrated war hero who helps train the main character over hundreds — possibly thousands — of time loops as Cruise’s Cage dies over and over, repeatedly. Edge of Tomorrow is a time travel movie at its core, and time travel movies frequently deal with logical plot holes. Yet Edge of Tomorrow features a particularly perplexing problem.
Emily Blunt’s Rita initiates a kiss with Tom Cruise’s Cage near the end of Edge of Tomorrow, and it makes no sense. There is no logic to the kiss from the movie’s plot perspective, and the alleged behind-the-scenes reason for the kiss doesn’t hold up either. The only benefit of Edge of Tomorrow‘s kiss is that it highlights the ridiculousness of a tired movie trope that should have died out long ago.
Edge Of Tomorrow’s Kiss Continued A Ridiculous Movie Trope
Emily Blunt has a history of playing gritty characters — there’s a reason why Blunt was almost cast as Black Widow. Edge of Tomorrow is no exception, with Rita Vrataski being a tough-as-nails, no-nonsense soldier. Tom Cruise’s William Cage progressively grows more attached to her because of his many time loops, but she technically knows him for only one day. Given how little she really knows him, and what kind of character she is for the vast majority of Edge of Tomorrow, her sudden kiss is downright inexplicable.
Apparently, Blunt went off-script by kissing Cruise, and she did it because “it just felt right.” That might be a great sign of chemistry between two actors, but it doesn’t account for the actual movie’s context. Ironically, a kiss was always supposed to happen. But director Doug Liman (who is slated to direct the upcoming Road House remake) and the rest of Edge of Tomorrow‘s team couldn’t figure out a kiss-worthy moment. That should have been a red flag.
Although Edge of Tomorrow‘s kiss still makes no sense, it does show the ridiculousness of the romantic kiss movie trope. There’s a time and a place for romance, even a mere kiss, and Hollywood’s outdated, continued insistence that romance belongs in all places at all times is a big mistake. It just so happens that the illogical context of Edge of Tomorrow‘s kiss exposes a very different kind of endless, seemingly inescapable loop.
