Edge of Tomorrow is a revolutionary take on time travel and a triumphant show of style and acting virtuosos in Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. This is not your normal time travel movie, where the protagonist goes back in time to change one instance of the past based on someone’s future. This movie is infused with pristine action scenes where William Cage(Tom Cruise) and Rita Vrataski(Emily Blunt) fight off an invading army humans have named ‘mimics’, which are writhing, octopus like creatures with more velocity and agility than any being on earth.

One could assume this is going to play out similarly to Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray learns how to be a compassionate person while he has to live the same day over and over again--No--this movie embodies the quick action fighting scenes reminiscent of a Jason Bourne movie. These quick scenes build up continuously in this movie, and you can feel the identity of the characters changing as the music gets faster and faster building toward a climax where the protagonists will break through a mental and physical wall holding them back from achieving their goals. This film achieves this difficult plateau in filmmaking working off of the stellar performances from all of the main actors to create the platform that Cage and Vrataski can defeat the enemy from.

Tom Cruise plays his role as a military pencil pusher/TV presence blackmailed into fighting in the front lines better than most could. He could have approached the role with an aggravated tone and been pissed off the whole movie by not giving an ounce of effort, but he seems to enjoy the whole live, die, and repeat slogan that the movie associates with his character. He revels in the opportunity to reshape his morality by proving to the world that he can defeat the mimics and their army by dying and being shot back in time every single day. He struggles with this and slowly changes himself into a brave man at the end of the movie, a far cry from the coward who tried to run from combat in the beginning.

Emily Blunt, a rugged leader known as ‘The Angel of Verdun’, crushed all of my expectations from when I saw the previews of this movie. She starts out as a tough, brave, no-nonsense warrior who does not take no for an answer. She goes through her own transformation, which is significantly shorter for her than Cage because she only lives once every day, while Cage, who repeats the same day over and over again for a few months, has fit a lifetime of memories into the same day. Vrataski dramatically opens up and draws more focus from the camera for her dialogue and not just the breathtaking action scenes. These changes are incredibly significant because she accomplished her character arc in a day where it took Cage a few months to a year, making Vrataski the more evolved, interesting character.

This movie may seem too complicated, violent, or quick-paced for some viewers, but this movie is a masterpiece for people looking for a surprisingly well-paced film. The amount of time that it takes Cage and Vrataski to figure out how to beat the aliens is over in a few scenes, but how the characters themselves are molded into better, braver people spans the entirety of the film. The transition from getting screamed at, “On your feet maggot!” to the end of the movie where Cage does not even have to tell Vrataski who he is because he has risen above the level of cowardly boasting, and has found a place where he can be grateful with himself.