On the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Allied forces' landing in Normandy, Americans have created yet another excellent sci-fi action film with Tom Cruise in the lead role. It is said that Brad Pitt was offered the role but declined, which was a mistake.... I must say, the film turned out to be amazing. Many compare the plot to the recently released Elysium, but technology—and not just technology, but humanity’s ability to synthesize and unite the most advanced concepts into a single action—never sleeps. I’ve always been drawn to various parallels and generalizations, no matter how far they go. The main characters repeatedly voice the idea that if all this were true, we would surely be considered mad. The psyche, it seems to me, inhabits the same environment as the physical world, and everything that happens within it must have counterparts in the external world and other sciences that, alongside psychology, propel the world forward. Therefore, everything shown in the film has already been said and depicted by someone before—whether Freud, Einstein, Nietzsche, or anyone else living today. Thus, the idea of eternal recurrence, first proposed by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, is revived in Freud’s seminal and highly modern work Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The title of the film, Edge of Tomorrow, I believe, is no coincidence. We are shown humanity’s utter helplessness in the face of nature’s forces—or rather, the weakness of rational, conscious thought in the face of how things likely truly unfold. There exists a gap within which progress is possible. Yet to achieve this progress, one must pay the price with dozens, if not hundreds, of lives, enduring disappointment, the frustration of omnipotence so inherent to humanity. One might think the film reveals the depth of despair, helplessness, weakness, and doom that lie within us and must be traversed on the path to selfhood and true freedom.
One would have to die and be disappointed dozens of times before realizing that life is singular, and it must be lived as if this knowledge were the only and ultimate truth.
An excellent film about the nature of mental and physical reality.
