Edge of Tomorrow's protagonists live, die, and repeat. But in order to keep the pacing of this cycle of sci-fi action going, some scenes had to be deleted.
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00 "Edge of Tomorrow's" protagonists live, die, and repeat, but in order to keep the
00:05 pacing of this cycle of sci-fi action going, some scenes had to be deleted.
00:10 "Edge of Tomorrow" sets up Tom Cruise's character, Major William Cage, much like Maverick from
00:14 Top Gun. He's the ultimate hotshot, but Major Cage is really just a pretty and confident
00:19 television spokesperson with no combat abilities, and even less understanding of how to operate
00:24 a mech suit to kill aliens. In the lead-up to his first mission, the other members of
00:28 the troop he's been forced into offer him no insight into what he's about to experience,
00:32 resenting his ignorance and presence. When it comes time to suit up in his combat armor
00:37 for the first time, Cage doesn't even know where the safety for his weapon is located.
00:41 While this scene ends on the abrupt introduction of Emily Blunt's character, Sergeant Rita
00:45 Bertasky, in the deleted footage, the scene continues to showcase Cage's ineptitude with
00:57 the suit.
00:59 While it's a pretty funny moment overall, all it does is present more evidence to his
01:03 cluelessness, which is something audiences are already fully aware of. The scene unnecessarily
01:08 slows down just at the moment when we're itching to go to the battlefield with the aliens for
01:12 the first time. Cruise conveys the characters' panic and unease with combat so effectively
01:16 that this extended gag becomes redundant. A fine, funny scene on its own, but a judicious
01:21 cut from the final film.
01:23 While our first deleted scene appears as if it were fairly close to making it into the
01:26 final film, since the color grading matches what we see in the rest of the completed movie,
01:30 this next deleted scene was something that was cut very early in the process. Not only
01:34 is this scene lacking color grading, but it features unfinished visual effects, visible
01:39 green screens, and a whole section in the pre-visualization phase using polygonal computer
01:44 graphics. We see Cage attempting to warn his fellow troops that there's an alien mimic
01:48 hiding underneath their position on the beachfront battlefield. We aren't given any inclination
01:52 as to where exactly this scene is taking place in the film's timeline, given that we return
01:56 to the same battle repeatedly within a looping, single-day structure.
01:59 But it appears to be fairly early on, as Cage's handling of his weaponry is still fairly amateur,
02:04 and his confidence in knowing what happens during the battle hasn't developed. While
02:08 this is something we see quite a few times in the film, this scene's main attraction
02:11 is its animated ending. After Cage is knocked out, he wakes to see the full destruction
02:16 and takeover of the human forces by the mimics before waking up to Terrence Maynard yelling
02:20 at him. Because this scene might have been placed fairly early in the story, the filmmakers
02:24 probably didn't want to play their hand too soon about how sideways the war with the mimics
02:28 could go. At this point, we're still having fun learning the rules and mechanics to this
02:32 repeated day, and having something that somber could potentially kill that fun.
02:37 When Cage is told by Vrtasky to find her after he wakes up when he's killed again, she starts
02:41 training Cage to improve his combat skills. In the final cut of the film, Cage confides
02:45 in Vrtasky that he's not trained for combat, which we immediately see in his first spar
02:50 against the army's mechanical training mimics. He doesn't have a single clue to what he is
02:54 doing. However, in the deleted scene, we see Cruise's character in a more frantic state
02:58 before we cut to his first training session. Even if Cage's lines are purposefully overflowing
03:10 with false confidence, the whiplash from his panicked 20 seconds earlier to this more brash
03:15 attitude is extreme. When isolated, each scene manages to work on its own, but when they're
03:20 juxtaposed against one another, they feel disconnected. By cutting these interactions
03:24 out, the filmmakers streamlined the story while also maintaining a tonal consistency.
03:28 Again, this is happening in the first 45 minutes of the movie, and our two heroes have only
03:32 recently come together for the first time. You don't want to let up on the fun quite
03:36 yet, and keeping that tone consistent is paramount.
03:40 Every science fiction movie has to find the right balance between its story and its worldbuilding.
03:44 Edge of Tomorrow is as much science fiction as it is a rip-roaring action flick. If it
03:48 had spent too much time getting bogged down in how its world operates, it would have slacked
03:52 the movie's pace and overburdened the audience with details that, in the end, aren't all
03:56 that important. Case in point, all of the soldiers in this futuristic war wear big and
04:00 clunky mech suits. When Cage shows audiences he doesn't know how to use one, it's funny,
04:09 but when he finally learns to command it, the action scenes become thrilling. We do
04:13 not need to know the particulars of how these suits operate in order to understand what's
04:16 going on, and so a scene that explained how these suits are powered was removed from the
04:20 final cuts. In the scene, Cage and Vrtasky make a pit stop to siphon some gas out of
04:25 an abandoned car. We see Vrtasky's reaction to the highway's desolation, something that
04:29 Cage has clearly become familiar with. But at the end of the scene, both of their suits
04:33 are running out of battery power, and she suggests bringing more next time. With the
04:37 entire world at stake, whether or not the suits' power supplies will last until the
04:41 end of the movie comes across as a trivial complication. The possibility of the character's
04:45 failure shouldn't rest on a minor tech issue.
04:49 Leading into the film's climax, Cage and Vrtasky need some further assistance in carrying
04:53 out their final plan, and so they decide to enlist the help of Cage's squad. From their
04:57 perspective, the team is skeptical about helping Cage, as they've only just met, but they're
05:01 more than willing to follow Vrtasky. Out of all the deleted scenes from the film, this
05:05 next one was most likely the easiest to cut, and the visible green screens in the background
05:09 certainly point in that direction. The deleted material basically amounts to a brief "suiting
05:13 up" montage. While this worked in many other action films before a movie's final climactic
05:18 fight, the suits in Edge of Tomorrow are just the same ones we've seen throughout the film.
05:22 There's nothing new to learn or experience here, and cutting from Cage's squad members
05:25 accepting their new mission to them starting that mission is more economical and effective.
05:30 While every other deleted scene in this video makes for an interesting watch outside of
05:33 the film, this is the one you can just skip entirely.
05:37 The final deleted scene from Edge of Tomorrow comes from the film's climactic final battle
05:41 against the Mimics. Arriving in Paris, the squad's ship is destroyed, and Cage ends
05:46 up in the water, and manages to crawl to dry land. In the final cut of the film, that's
05:50 all that happens, but the cut footage of this scene manages to give Paris an even eerier
05:54 feeling than what was already present. Cage takes time to survey the emptiness, and while
05:58 he does, he sees a horse on the flooded street.
06:01 As is the case with so many of these deleted scenes, this moment slows down the film's
06:13 pacing. With the final showdown with the Mimics being so close, this couldn't be a worse
06:17 time to decide to slow down and take in the haunting scenery.
06:20 Like the aforementioned deleted Battlefield scene, this one is also filled with unfinished
06:24 visual effects and is lacking proper color correction. The horse looks to be real, but
06:29 was shot separately and was composited into the scene.
06:32 Very rarely are the quality of deleted scenes vastly inferior to the final film. There is
06:36 nothing particularly wrong with any of these scenes on their own, and they may have worked
06:39 in other versions of Edge of Tomorrow. However, films constantly evolve, from the first draft
06:44 of a screenplay to the final sound mix, gradually revealing what kind of movie the filmmakers
06:49 are actually making. The final version of Edge of Tomorrow didn't need any of these
06:52 deleted scenes, and was arguably better without them, but on their own, they still offer an
06:57 interesting glimpse into how the film eventually took shape.
06:59 -