The entertainment industry still seems to be stuck in a gravy and mash potatoes fueled post-Thanksgiving malaise, so there aren’t that many big stories happening. But while all’s quiet over on the Hollywood front, over in ol’ London Town, quite a big ruckus was kicked up by quite a small man over the weekend.
Following the explosive first pic, Tom Cruise gave us the second look at his character, in director Doug Liman’s All You Need Is Kill, when they shut down Trafalgar Square for Cruise and co to play solders, complete with choppers and tanks.
The scene apparently has to do with an attack on a nearby embassy with Cruise and friends flown in to defuse the volatile situation. I’m guessing that things don’t go so well though, as the only place in the synopsis (below) where I can see this fitting, is if this was the event that got him demoted and sent on an one way ticket to Alien Groundhog Day.
Based on the acclaimed novel “All You Need is Kill” by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, the story unfolds in a near future in which 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. No army in the world can match the speed, brutality or seeming prescience of the weaponized Mimic fighters or their telepathic commanders. But now the world’s armies have joined forces for a last stand offensive against the alien horde, with no second chances.
Lt. Col. Bill Cage (Cruise) is 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.
But with each pass, Cage becomes tougher, smarter, and able to engage the Mimics with increasing skill, alongside Special Forces warrior Rita Vrataski (Blunt), who has lain waste to more Mimics than anyone on Earth. As Cage and Rita take the fight to the aliens, each repeated battle becomes an opportunity to find the key to annihilating the alien invaders and saving the Earth.
This certainly is a far more grounded cry from the fist pic from the film, which saw Cruise decked out in a robotic exo-skeleton running away from a giant explosion. In fact, there’s just about nothing in these pics that even indicate that this film is based in the future, which is rather strange. I would have at least expected a few adjustments to the vehicles (which seem to be sponsored by Allen Boesak’s United Democratic Front), based on that advanced mech gear that Cruise’ character was wearing. Maybe it’s not as far into the future as we think, and that was just some adapted alien tech? Or maybe this whole thing is just an elaborate charade to allow Cruise to play out his Officer and a Gentleman fantasies?
The pics come courtesy of ComingSoon,net, The Daily Mail and The Telegraph.
Last Updated: November 26, 2012
