The Movies of 'Tomorrow'

Edge of Tomorrow is a new film with Tom Cruise, and such an 'edgy' and 'tomorrowy' title got me thinking about other 'tomorrow' movies. Is Edge of Tomorrow's title just some cliché collection of evocative words intended to give another piece of 2 hour crap some punchy weight at the box office? Surely not! They couldn't call it All You Need is Kill, as the original Japanese novel was named in English, for fear of attracting only teenage boys and upsetting the Paranoid Mom's Brigade. Why, the creators must have had at the forefront of their minds the anxious human preoccupation of the unknown future, and the transient and fleeting nature of the 'edge' or indeed, the present, the ungraspable now. Indeed, are we not always on the 'edge of tomorrow'? Well, from about 11pm today we are.

Enter Cruise, and the story practically writes itself, but in case the name 'Edge of Tomorrow' didn't give anything away after all (on account of it being meaningless) here's a roundup gleamed from the trailer. Tom has the uncanny ability to start days again in the way that no one has since Bill Murray. All he needs to do is die. (If I could bring someone back from the dead, I'm not sure I would've picked Tom Cruise, but there we go.) 

There are also lots of guns, big guns with lots of chrome bullets that make all sorts of cool noises, and exoskeleton body armour, and a ruthless boss (Emily Blunt) who bluntly puts Tom though countless bloody executions to train him up to win the war until, inevitably, he becomes some kind of Übermensch. The trailer doesn't give away the ending but I'll bet that zombie Cruise overcomes the onslaught of perpetual dying and eventually wins the day, probably single-handedly. But then what? Do the credits roll? Or does this new Frankenstein's Monster want payback? Maybe that's one for Edge of Tomorrow II – Now Who's Dying? 

The world has moved on since Groundhog Day, and with the viewing public constantly pausing, skipping and repeating their telly box, the theme couldn't be more prescient. Add that to the eternal quandary of making endless mistakes – something I know more about that anything – and increasingly affordable and higher quality CGI, and you have yourself a movie my friend.

Before we move on to some more 'tomorrow' movies, an honourable mention goes to Jake Gyllenhaal in his own terribly-named(-but-good) movie, Source Code, which has a similar premise to Edge of Tomorrow. In it Jake keeps waking up on a train to complete a military-backed sting operation to stop an impending terrorist attack. From Moon director Duncan Jones, this was a decent effort, darkly tragic and claustrophobic, sensitive and with more than a little comment on the mighty military and its ethics. Perhaps Cruise's flick will be just as good, but until then, here are my other favourite 'tomorrow' movies which will keep you on the 'edge' of your seats.

The Day After Tomorrow 

Another clever title this one, because insofar as the day after tomorrow is always two days from now, it never arrives in real life, meaning that this is putty in the hands of climate change deniers. Of course what Roland Emmerich was trying to suggest is the just-around-the-corner creeping doom of global warming. The movie itself is fantastically over-exaggerated, and if Dennis Quaid's brow wasn't so sincerely furrowed, then it would have been hard to have taken the movie as anything but an ironic jab at the presumed scare-mongering of Green lobby (something which South Park put into practise with their episode, Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow).

Tomorrow Never Dies 

What with crackers like You Only Live Twice, Diamonds are Forever, The Living Daylights, The World is Not Enough, Die Another Day and Quantum – would you believe it – of Solace, the James Bond franchise must have its own department for coming up with movie titles which give nothing away except for the fact that the movie will be exactly the same as the last one, save for a different hairstyle and a re-imagined Martini quip. But that's why Bonders like Bond – the reliable, uncomplicated and explosive sameness. If you took all the Bond movie names, jiggled them around in a hat and randomly assigned them to different Bond movies, no one would notice. (Let me grant the small exception of Skyfall, which is taking a small risk by exposing dedicated Bonders to something bordering complexity.) 

But back to Tomorrow Never Dies, which is a great title because it invites us to ask in what way does tomorrow live, considering that tomorrow is an abstract concept, and a concept which signifies something that never exists now, being as tomorrow is always in the future. Maybe tomorrow dies if the world ends today? That must be it, because Pierce Bond Brosnan is trying to save the world from an impending Anglo-Chinese war provoked by a profiteering media baron. Of course if tomorrow did die, then there would be no viewers for his media enterprise, which would put something of a hitch on his post-war plans. 

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? 

One wonders if this movie was a spin off from Dirty Dancing, in which the famous Shirelles song was used, with Patrick Swayze now putting his new young wife ('Baby') in the corner while he drinks and dances and practices walking on that log across the river. But actually it's a Taiwanese romcom from 2013, about the struggle between romance and security, and if I know anything about Taiwanese politics, it's that tomorrow's tortured romances are indeed the question – I'm looking at you China.

Escape from Tomorrow

An ingenious title, this one, because it's as if tomorrow is a place that you have to escape. A place like a theme park – Disney World, for example. In this creepy fantasy the main character loses his job and then embarks on a Freudian crisis of masculinity as he trips his way through America's Magic Kingdom, hallucinating on rides, spellbound by two horrifically thin French cuties and other intoxicating ladies, and generally being a bad dad. Eventually it all unravels into a Disney-Siemens mind-control cat-flu conspiracy that eventually has dad crapping himself to death.

With Disney's corporate tentacles branching out into real-life make believe, having developed a picture perfect town in Florida called Celebration, who knows what tomorrow will bring? I know it's a terrifyingly steam-cleaned hyper-privatised smiling dystopia from which I'd also be keen to escape.

Tomorrow We Live 

Tomorrow We Live has an alternative title which is, rather confusingly, At Dawn We Die. Well, which is it, director George King? You'd have to watch to find out, and if you did you'd realise that Tomorrow We Live makes sense for half the movie when the French Resistance (oh, it's a WW2 film, by the way) are making gains, but At Dawn We Die becomes a more appropriate name once the Nazis start executing people.

Tomorrow When the War Began

This paradoxically titled Australian flick is not only remarkable in that the 'war' is claimed to start tomorrow, raising that interesting question – so what of today? – but also it began tomorrow, suggesting the titillating possibility of time travel. Also, the war begins or began in Australia, which is a nice change to countless worlds ending in America. That's where the similarities end though, because apart from accents and the token ethnic minority being a buff Asian guy instead of a buff black guy, this is indistinguishable from an endless list of US movies about horny wayward teens with better-than-average looks getting in over their heads.

This time, over their heads means going on a trip and coming back to total war waged by unspecified Asians. The kids have to go guerilla to save the day. If you were to notice the corny acting and charmingly bumbling dialogue you might suspects that, despite the profundity, the curious title might just be a typo. This would be plausible if it wasn't that same in the original novel, and it is.

So the title's suggestion of time travel was scuppered in favour of something far more powerful – paranoia about China, fed neatly to an impressionable 12A audience. The war begins 'tomorrow', when they are due to come back from camping, but as we see from the start this story is being narrated retrospectively, so the world began, not begins or will begin. It's clever!