Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the ending?

[Trekker4747]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

Can we open this thread up for open discussion without needing to resort to the spoiler code? There seems to be no "official" discussion thread and this one has more-or-less taken on that mantle. Maybe we can get a SciFi mod to edit the title of the thread to warn of spoilers.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

cage's consciousness went back. Not his body. So if he was at 80 percent and dropping as the day went on, he would be back to 80 again when he reset, because it's the same body at the same moment in time that is still at 80 percent. Notice. For all his training, he can't get stronger, exercise doesn't go back in time, and neither does muscle memory which is a huge component of reflexes. No wonder he sucked forever while training.

It must be that the first time that Cage was sent back that his altered consciousness altered his blood, sticking him at %100 and he slept through the loss of the first 20 percent of the power.

Time thrown consciousness alters the blood once, blood sends him back as a time consciousness that is being thrown that alters his blood when it arrives, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

If he doesn't have the blood he can't be sent back, and the altered consciousness that he already has isn't going to alter that blood in him again.

I was thinking that this time power was a method of stardrive, but it didn't compute.

Until I figured out that the consciousness of the Omega is moving/living backwards through time from heat death to the big bang.

 

[Saga]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

you know how sometimes when you're playing a video game and you save...only to be killed five seconds later? and there's no way to get out of the kill loop? that's how i imagined this film ending. i'm glad it didn't end that way though.

 

[Trekker4747]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

you know how sometimes when you're playing a video game and you save...only to be killed five seconds later? and there's no way to get out of the kill loop? that's how i imagined this film ending. i'm glad it didn't end that way though.

Something like that happened to me in an old computer game back in the old 8086 computer days. It was a Sierra adventure game called "Police Quest." At one point you arrest a car-thief and take him to the local jail to incarcerate him. Before entering the jail you're supposed to lock your service gun in a locker outside the front door, which I did.

Unfortuantely, I had forgotten to frisk the suspect when arresting him in order to recover his weapon. So when I took off the cuffs he immediately drew on me.

I tried to restore an earlier save point but hit the wrong button and accidentally saved this situation. The suspect didn't fire or move just stayed there with his gun drawn. The game wasn't officially "ended" because you could still type commands into it although nothing you typed worked and you couldn't move. I suspect a "game over" situation had been reached but there was some error in the game's code preventing an actual "end condition" from being achieved.

It was then I learned to not only be sure to keep the save and restore buttons straight but to always save often and have multiple save files rather than one.

 

[ThunderAeroI]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

I tell my kids there are three rules to saving your game:

- Save Early
- Save Often
- and in Different slots

There are other lessor rules:

- Small hallway to large room, Save...
- Large room into a small hallway, Save...
- Did you just come from a well lite area and can only see dark around you, Save.

In situations where you have limited saves:

- Always keep the top one the arc beginning
- Always keep the next one the section beginning

In situations where there are only checkpoints

- Learn how the game saves and what it saves on you for each checkpoint.

 

[Aldo]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

you know how sometimes when you're playing a video game and you save...only to be killed five seconds later? and there's no way to get out of the kill loop? that's how i imagined this film ending. i'm glad it didn't end that way though.

Something like that happened to me in an old computer game back in the old 8086 computer days. It was a Sierra adventure game called "Police Quest." At one point you arrest a car-thief and take him to the local jail to incarcerate him. Before entering the jail you're supposed to lock your service gun in a locker outside the front door, which I did.

Unfortuantely, I had forgotten to frisk the suspect when arresting him in order to recover his weapon. So when I took off the cuffs he immediately drew on me.

I tried to restore an earlier save point but hit the wrong button and accidentally saved this situation. The suspect didn't fire or move just stayed there with his gun drawn. The game wasn't officially "ended" because you could still type commands into it although nothing you typed worked and you couldn't move. I suspect a "game over" situation had been reached but there was some error in the game's code preventing an actual "end condition" from being achieved.

It was then I learned to not only be sure to keep the save and restore buttons straight but to always save often and have multiple save files rather than one.

LOL! I had a similar situation in Police Quest (it part 3 though).

I wear nearing the end of the game, and I crashed my car. Then for some reason I accidentally saved my game on the "Game Over" screen. I think it's fucking stupid that they allow you to save while the game is chiding you for dying, but there you go.

Tried to reload my game, and I reloaded the death screen. I was really mad.

 

[Destructor]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

you know how sometimes when you're playing a video game and you save...only to be killed five seconds later? and there's no way to get out of the kill loop? that's how i imagined this film ending. i'm glad it didn't end that way though.

Fuck that is existentially scary. I mean, he kind of WAS in that circumstance (he was in hell, basically), just drawn out over a day, but at one point he did kind of resign himself to never escaping the loop. But if the loop was only five seconds long, he'd basically be dying, forever. That's fucking bleak.

So... do all of the timelines he created continue on? Like, in the loop where he got run over by the truck, there was a few seconds after his death where his squad reacted to him rolling under the truck... does that mean that all the timelines were 'real', and it was just the last iteration of the loop that he (and we), personally, continued in?

Reminds me of this Godman comic:

http://boingboing.net/2014/06/04/tom-the-dancing-bug-god-man-v.html

 

[O'Dib]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

Can we open this thread up for open discussion without needing to resort to the spoiler code? There seems to be no "official" discussion thread and this one has more-or-less taken on that mantle. Maybe we can get a SciFi mod to edit the title of the thread to warn of spoilers.

Anyone looking in a thread about explaining the end of the movie without having seen it rightly deserves to be spoiled. If this were a general discussion thread, then all these spoiler coded entries would make sense.

 

[Trekker4747]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

So... do all of the timelines he created continue on? Like, in the loop where he got run over by the truck, there was a few seconds after his death where his squad reacted to him rolling under the truck... does that mean that all the timelines were 'real', and it was just the last iteration of the loop that he (and we), personally, continued in?

The fact that we, the viewers, see things going on as normal after he dies in a couple of the instances suggests that, yes, things "continued on" for everyone else.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

It just took him a few minutes to bite it.

 

[ThunderAeroI]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

I don't recall any one scene where we see past his death. If one did exist, it would be the first time he was ran over by the vehicle. I'm willing to write that off as 'funny' or it just took him that long to really die.

Like everyone else I have a question about the ending.

Q. Why is he back on the helicopter at the end, or better yet why does he wake up on sacks like he does for the majority of the movie. Does his active cognitive stat impact when he can wake up? For example; he can only wake up when his body actually wakes up?

I'm willing to think that his grin at the end of the movie is more about being pleased it all worked than being "Omega" as suggested in the Dark Theory above.

If a sequel were going to be made from the Dark Perspective, how would that really work? Plus, There are shockingly few movies that star Tom Cruise that have sequels, like None - save one, Mission Impossible.

 

[Trekker4747]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

I suspect he first woke up one "cycle" before his death the first time around. (A "cycle" either being an Earth day, an alien day, or whatever cycular mechanism this time-traveling aspect of the aliens works on) and this pretty much "grounded" the reset point from then on, no matter when he died in future iterations.

The last time around he still "woke up" at this point but since the destruction of the Omega effected changes into the past it shifted things around enough that he no longer was unconscious in the barracks courtyard at this point, but was asleep in the helicopter instead.

 

[ThunderAeroI]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

Thats logical I suppose but he was sleeping on the helicopter earlier when he first visits the commanders office.

 

[Gaith]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

Pretty sure y'all are giving this more thought than the writers did.

They wanted to spook the audience into thinking all had been for nought, but the usual airfield wake-up would have been anticlimactic and overly familiar, so they went a bit further back. That's all.

 

[Trekker4747]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

Thats logical I suppose but he was sleeping on the helicopter earlier when he first visits the commanders office.

That doesn't necessarily undo my theory. Again, things just got shifted around.

 

[DWF]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

They probably wanted a happy ending and that's why they pulled him back to when he wakes up in the helicopter. It is alittle odd that a movie about war and death where people die repeatedly in the end has nobody dying. I thought it was pretty stupid though to throw Cage into combat with no real kowledge of how the cuit works, let along where the safety is for his weapons.

 

[Gaith]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

It is alittle odd that a movie about war and death where people die repeatedly in the end has nobody dying.

Except, y'know, the untold millions in Europe at least during the actual invasion.

I thought it was pretty stupid though to throw Cage into combat with no real kowledge of how the cuit works, let along where the safety is for his weapons.

Nothing about the military in this movie makes any sense. Officers can't be busted down without hearings, paperwork, etc., and they certainly can't be demoted to enlisted status, nor would any enlisted infantry leader let a stranger he considered mentally unstable in his ranks right before a battle.

Another reason Battle: LA is the superior film; it takes a ludicrous scenario (alien invasion) and then takes it fairly seriously, whereas this takes a ludicrous scenario, treats it fairly ludicrously (Cage's mixup/demotion), then throws a ludicrous time travel plot on top of all that.

 

[DWF]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

It is alittle odd that a movie about war and death where people die repeatedly in the end has nobody dying.

Except, y'know, the untold millions in Europe at least during the actual invasion.

Well, I did mean the movie's main characters, the people we really get to know.

 

[Trekker4747]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

They probably wanted a happy ending and that's why they pulled him back to when he wakes up in the helicopter. It is alittle odd that a movie about war and death where people die repeatedly in the end has nobody dying. I thought it was pretty stupid though to throw Cage into combat with no real kowledge of how the cuit works, let along where the safety is for his weapons.

The battle on the beach seemed to be a last-ditch effort to do whatever it took to try and win the war. It was pretty much the very last hope they felt they had. Cage was recruited to be nothing more than cannon fodder.

Nothing about the military in this movie makes any sense. Officers can't be busted down without hearings, paperwork, etc., and they certainly can't be demoted to enlisted status, nor would any enlisted infantry leader let a stranger he considered mentally unstable in his ranks right before a battle.

I never fully took it he was actually an officer and that that status was nothing more than an honorary one. He spoke of being in an ROTC unit in college before going into advertising which fell apart when the war started. He likely had enough connections and charisma to BS his way into being a pundit on cable news and was given something of an honorary officer's title and uniform since he was good at selling the war to people to drum up support for it. Pretty much, he was pre-hero Captain America.

When the battle at Normandy was devised they needed every body they could get and he was a body, since his title was an honorary one it didn't really matter to strip him of it and make him a private. I suspect the commanding officer had every intention to allow Cage to keep his honorary title and his something of a "position" of a morale leader in the media but Cage sorta talked his way out of that respect during the meeting. So, fine, Cage wants to be kind of a dick about things, strip him of the title he doesn't really have and treat him like the war-dodging DB he was.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Re: Edge of Tomorrow: fun movie but can someone please explain the end

He was an actual officer with the rank of major in the US Army who was attached to the UDF. He just hadn't seen any combat because he was a desk jockey public relations guy. That doesn't make his rank any less real.

And the General wasn't just throwing him in to be cannon fodder until Cage had 1) refused to follow orders, 2) attempted to blackmail him, and 3) attempted to desert his post. Originally the General wanted to use his popularity as a TV figure to promote the cause from the frontlines with an embedded camera crew in what he thought would be a victorious battle. He wasn't just trying to throw his life away at first. He considered him important. It was only when Cage was a monumental douche that he said "fuck this guy" and sent him off to be a grunt without any training.

Also, about whether you could be busted from major to private so easily in the real military...
- It's not the real military, it's a made up multinational force.
- It's an alien invasion, not Gulf War XII, so the stakes are a lot higher and desperate measures easier to pull off.
- The General was purposely sidestepping official channels and using the confusion of the coming battle to do so.