Nov 09 2014 11:52 AM
As the world defends itself against an alien invasion, Tomato Cruise plays a military officer specializing in PR who gets thrown into a combat regiment, despite no combat experience or training, about to be launched in an important assault that's expected to be the turning point in the war. (It's clearly set up as an historical parallel to D-Day --- beach assault in France launched by a multi-national force headquartered in Britain, against a foe expanding out of Germany, as the Russians push back from the East.)
The wrinkle comes as the protagonist is killed, as expected, within minutes of the landing, but then wakes up at the beginning of the day, before the assault, and it starts all over again. It's Groundhog Day, except in the near future, with enormous guns and powerful telemetry suits.
Like a kid in the arcade with a pocket full of quarters, he does only modestly better with each return to the battlefield, until he enlists the help of Emily Blunt, a hardened war hero who he has to re-introduce himself to every day.
Like most latter day Cruise-missiles launched on a weary public, the film did much better on the international market than domestically. The studio gleaned that the soap opera-y title was a big part of the reason, and so quickly redirected to feature the film's tag lines more prominently than the title in the second-generation film posters and DVD packaging.