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Edge of Tomorrow

Edge of Tomorrow isn't a time travel movie proper. It's one of those time-rewind move in the 'Groundhog day' fashion, but with a twist (or two). It is interesting because not being a true time-travel situation, they could have gotten away with keeping consistency without much difficulty - SPOILER ALERT -: once the desired outcome was achieved, there would be no need to "reset" and try again, and life would go on without there being any paradox.


However, instead of a neat and unproblematic ending, they chose to have the main characters die in the final battle, and in order to bring them together they needed to have one last "reset", but one without the creature they just managed to finally kill. So for some unexplained reason the last reset rewinds time to an earlier moment to a changed past, where there isn't a creature to fight against. So basically them having killed it in the future has erased it from the past, which is our good old paradox again.


So here we are, in The Time Traveler's Black Box, trying to find a way to avoid the paradox, and Edge of Tomorrow introduces it in a scenario where it is not necessary at all! They could have just rewound time again to the same starting point as all previous iterations, and have Cage and Vratasky try again, making sure to survive that last time, couldn't they?


Here are some guys who'd disagree, and have even drawn a detailed timeline of events.


In any case, in Edge of Tomorrow they at least made an effort, unlike other similar movies, to explain why Cage could remember his living through the previous iterations whilst the rest of the world is fully unaware. He got the power from the "alpha" alien he killed.


So Edge of Tomorrow would get a 0 for time-travel, 1 for their explanation of what's occurring and a -1 for needlessly introducing the paradox! Visualisation: 0.

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