Edge of Tomorrow and the Eternal Recurrence of Groundhog Day

by Christopher Barr

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence, even the spider and the moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.  The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Edge of Tomorrow is a fantastically intelligent and fresh science fiction mega movie, where the Earth is on the brink of destruction from an alien race of beings.  Tom Cruise plays Major William Cage, a United Defence Forces (UDF) spokesperson and a cowardice United States military officer that has never seen a battlefield.  After being reluctantly and quite forcibly dropped in on an alien-controlled frontline with the first wave of Operation Downfall, Cage begins to see the horrifying enormity of war as he lands on the beach, wearing an armed mechanical exo-suit called a Jacket.  After lucking out as bombs are dropped and soldiers around him die by the dozens, Cage is killed.

Reset.

Cage wakes up on a military base at Heathrow Airport in London and repeats the day, again and again and again.  He discovers that he must learn how to kill the aliens, a squirrelly hideous organism that the humans call “Mimics”.  During his first death, Cage detonates a claymore mine killing himself along with a creepy bluish alien later revealed as an Alpha, a rare unusually large alien that possesses a direct connection to a singular consciousness called the “Omega”, a collective alien brain of sorts that controls all the Mimics.   The Alpha’s blood is mixed with Cage’s, giving him the ability to reset the day each time he is killed, waking him up each day back on the military base in a continuous time loop.

Reset.

Cage’s exo-suit is an intriguing piece of technology.  Developed to turn a regular man into a super-soldier, equipping him with weapons on his arms as well as weapons that come out of the back part of the suit.  It gives Cage super strength and the ability to achieve decisive victory.  The problem is; in the beginning Cage has no idea how to use it, he just fumbles with it as people die around him and then he is killed yet again.

Reset.

Cage meets Rita on the battlefield just before she is killed.  Rita is a hero to the armada, a Joan of Arc figure, a hero known by many as the “Angel of Verdun” or the “Full Metal Bitch” behind her back.  She has won many battles against the Mimics in the past but this current battle in Northwestern France, the invasion force, along with Rita, get annihilated due to the Mimics being able to anticipate the entire attack.  Cage eventually gets Rita to train him how to use the exo-suit and fight the Mimics.  The capability that Cage has to reset the day, Rita once possessed but since a blood transfusion she has lost her ability to reset.  Cage attempts to save her and defeat the enemy but he himself is killed over and over again as he tries to learn to beat this alien species by using their technologically proficient ability to alter time.

Reset.

Cage learns about the Mimic’s bio-technology, he learns that they tactically manipulate time to find their enemy’s weakness and kill them before they even see it coming.  The upper hand here is experience, the more they repeat the battles, the more they know what to expect and defend against.  This technology makes them pretty much undefeatable. 

Edge of Tomorrow is a movie about making better choices to advance one’s life and in the fight, knowledge is key.  Knowledge here isn’t just tactical, it’s enlightening.  Edge of Tomorrow has a comedy that it draws its inspiration from as well as a philosophy.  It’s a movie that asks a lot of questions about time and space as well as one’s willingness to rise up and be more than the seemingly sum of one’s parts.     

“A splendid centre of infinity’s whirl

Pushed to its zenith’s height, its last expanse,

Felt the divinity of its own self-bliss

Repeated in its numberless other selves.”

-  Sri Aurobindo

The 1993 comedy Groundhog Day poses a number of similar questions about the nature of reality and how one is able to overcome oneself.  The melancholic weatherman in the beginning of the film is someone that feels that he is living a life with no hope, no meaning and no escape.  He’s a man with no future, no past, just this empty feeling of nothingness that appears to be everlasting.  Is life’s meaning self-created or self-imposed?  What is Phil the weatherman to do in his unbreakable loop of existence that not only he shares but also a huge percentage of the population of the world?

Phil in the film is confronted with the fact that he has no future; he’s doomed to relive an ordinary day over and over again.  Phil attempts to escape Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania but is informed by a police officer that a blizzard is coming.  The officer tells Phil that, “You can go back to Punxsutawney or you can freeze to death!”  What he didn’t realize is the officer was pretty well summing up Phil’s own banal, meaningless life.  Phil chooses to go back to Punxsutawney and avoid freezing to death only to return to the Groundhog Day festival, again and again and again, frozen in this boring passage in time.  Phil, after much difficulty, must realize to not live for tomorrow, but live today.  

Nietzsche looked around and saw a society eating itself apart without ever learning that its Christian values are hollow and its future is bleak, if it wasn’t able to surpass its ancient sensibility and create a future that isn’t so limited by the pasts Iron Age superstitions, society would crumble under its own ignorance.

Groundhog Day was about a man who needed to confront his own banality in order to free up infinite possibility for his future.  He needed to overcome himself and be more than the possibilities that he felt he saw in a mirror.  He needed to finally see his Lacanian ‘lack’.  He needed to see that he is beyond the limitations of his parents and his environment, that he has to take ownership of himself and forge his own future, and not one seemingly psychologically linked to him through blood and tradition.  

Groundhog Day was about changing one’s constitution for the better.  Phil was an angry, bitter man that most avoided to be around, but as the film progressed Phil started to see that change was paramount and more importantly, that change has to come from him.  As the same day kept returning when the alarm clock went off at 6am, Phil experienced a number of psychological stages.  He played for a bit and then killed himself a number of times, then got bored and then woke up.  Love in this story is what ignited his desire for change, but I think it wasn’t until the old homeless man kept dying and Phil kept on failing to find ways of saving him, that Phil truly experienced an awakening.

Phil began to better himself and not in selfish ways like he did before, picking up girls and embarrassing other people for example.  Phil set out to become the Overman, the man that surpasses himself through epistemological means.  Along the way Phil became a better person because knowledge brings understanding, it brings perspective, and in the end, knowledge brings wonder.

Edge of Tomorrow and Groundhog Day are both fascinating narratives, expressing the path to enlightenment, the path to awakening.  These movies are about freeing oneself from the loop of automatic piloting, of avoiding what is expected and replacing it for what is right, not only for you but for those you live your life around.  Nietzsche wasn’t pleased with society’s backward ignorance and only hoped that mankind would evolve out of it.  He was right in thinking that wouldn’t be easy, and more realistically, unlikely at all.  The fight to free one from the shackles of tradition, the chains of conformity is a fight most will never encounter in their lifetime.  But with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and films like Edge of Tomorrow, one can only hope to wake up in the loop and take the path toward breaking it.

“This is a world where nothing is solved.  Someone once told me, ‘Time is a flat circle.’  Everything we’ve ever done or will do we’re gonna do over and over and over again…..and that little boy and that little girl, they’re gonna be in that room again… and again… and again… forever.”

  - Rust Cohle, From the HBO’s True Detective

“Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being.

Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being.

Everything breaks, everything is joined anew: eternally the same house of being is built.  Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself.  In ever Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There.  The center is everywhere.  Bent is the path of eternity.”

 - Nietzsche