The ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ Ending You Didn’t See (And Why You Saw The One That You Did)

I recently posted this in which I analyzed Edge of Tomorrow which is one of my favorite science fiction movies in recent years. So it was with interest I read a Film School Rejects article about the movie featuring comments from screenwriter Christopher MacQuarrie.

SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to know about the ending, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. You have been forewarned!

Here is an excerpt from the FSR article:

We spoke with screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, who explained the original script for Edge of Tomorrow was tonally much darker. Cruise stressed the importance of the story’s humor, even when people like McQuarrie initially didn’t see the joke. Once Edge of Tomorrow began to lean more heavily on the comedy, that’s when this happy ending materialized. As McQuarrie reminds us, comedies generally have to go back to the way things were, and that’s exactly what Edge of Tomorrow did.

“I was always arguing it has to end on the helicopter,” he explained. “You have to be thrown back to wondering, ‘Did the movie even happen? Did any of this really happen?’ To that end, there were a million things you had to do with the writing and visually, to serve that ending. That presented a lot of challenges and debate for us. We really struggled to deliver what the movie needed to be emotionally. I know the ending was somewhat controversial, with some people who didn’t like it. I think the only way to make those people happy would to end the movie in a way that wasn’t happy. We weren’t interested in doing that. It needed to end in a way that wasn’t harsh.” [emphasis added]

McQuarrie argued for another element that, unlike returning to Cage sleeping on the helicopter, didn’t make the final cut: a pretty bonkers sounding moment in the third act.

“When Tom loses the power, and they go to Paris, and Tom is preparing the team as they go into Paris where he’s telling them the rules of the movie, he tells the team everything the audience knows,” says McQuarrie. “Basically, he told them: ‘Kill as many Mimics as you want, but do not kill an Alpha. If you kill an alpha we’ll be right back here having this conversation, and we won’t even know it. The enemy will know we’re coming and they’ll kill us all.’ When they get to Paris there’s the classic horror movie scene where one of them gets separated from the group, and he gets attacked by an Alpha and kills it. As he kills it, you see the Omega reset the day and you see the point-of-view of the villain. We cut to the plane and hear the same speech all over again. This time when he gets to the line, ‘You can bet they’ll have a plan to kill us all,’ the ship gets hit. As the audience, you realize the enemy knows they’re coming. The problem was you were so exhausted by the time you got to that point.”

Ultimately they didn’t want to add any more sci-fi, timey wimey talk. They already had a lot of exposition to get through, to the point where one day both Liman and Emily Blunt expressed their frustration for a scene where Rita explains the rules to Cage. McQuarrie, on the other hand, saw it as necessity. When they were filming that scene, Liman complained that he hadn’t needed that much exposition to make his spy thrillers, so McQuarrie asked, “Doug, how many time traveling aliens were there in The Bourne Identity?”

Sure, the alternate ending might have made more logical sense, but two things.

First, as noted, it would have required a ton of exposition. And there is nowhere more challenging to work with exposition than in a story’s third act. That’s when all the action should be charging toward a conclusion, not slowing down to have talking heads explain shit.

Second, McQuarrie’s line of reasoning I highlighted in bold above is precisely the same as what I argued in my June 9 post:

Before I close my comments, I want to address a critique floating around out there about the ending, for example this blog post from one of my favorite sites /Film: Three Reasons Why That “Edge of Tomorrow” Ending Is The Worst. Here are the three reasons:

1) It makes no damn sense.
2) It destroys all the stakes that the film expertly built up.
3) It strikes the wrong tone.

You can read the article to drill down into the rationale for each line of argumentation. Perhaps this is correct in terms of rational logic, but as I have said about movies, emotional logic trumps rational logic virtually every time.

In Hollywood, there is an age-old saying about movie endings: “Give them what they expect, then give them what they want” (I noted this in today’s Daily Dialogue post).

In Edge of Tomorrow, what we expect is that Cage and Rita are dead. Or at least Rita. But that’s not what we want. What we want is what the movie gives us: Cage and Rita together at last.

You know why? Because we care about the characters. Moreover they have gone to hell and back, multiple times, and they deserve to be together… and we deserve to see that reunion at the end… which by the way is played perfectly with Rita looking at Cage for the ‘first’ time with her tough gal “what do you want” line, then Cage just laughing out loud at the total absurdity of the situation, but with the glorious realization of what he and Rita have accomplished… and now they can be together. Again all of this because we genuinely care about this duo.

With an actual human movie-going audience, emotional logic trumps rational logic every time, as we see in Edge of Tomorrow.

For the rest of the Film School Rejects article, go here.

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