Follow TV Tropes

This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

Following

Nightmare Fuel / Edge of Tomorrow

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/edgetomorrow2_5.jpg
Just the first of MANY deaths Cage will unfortunately suffer throughout the film.
Spoilers Off applies to all Nightmare Fuel pages, so all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
  • The Mimics, especially when we first see them. Not to mention they can pop out from seemingly anywhere, dormant until something causes them to wake up. There's also when Cage kills an Alpha. His first death is... not pretty.
    • They don't even appear to have a solid shape, always vibrating and moving around so they're blurry and out-of-focus to the human eye unless they're not moving (and even then they're still vibrating). The blue alpha mimic is even worse in its uncanniness. It doesn't blink and its mouth is constantly agape so it looks like it's in the midst of roaring.
  • The Omega Mimic is disturbingly eerie due how incomprehensible it is, especially in Cage's visions.
  • The battle where Cage is dropped from the first wave. It's reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan's Normandy Invasion, with chaos and carnage everywhere, and little time to think when lives are snuffed around you in the blink of an eye. Of course, after each of Cage's "deaths", it starts to become Black Comedy, but it's still horrifying to think that every person is killed differently each time the day resets with no memory of it happening, meaning it could continue on indefinitely unless the Omega Mimic is killed (and that's assuming you get killed before that happens).
  • Dying probably hundreds of times by Cage. He retains his memory every loop, so he's probably able to remember all of his painful deaths. Think about what it would do to a person to experience this.
    • In fact, all of Cage's deaths that aren't Played for Laughs tend to fall into this category... including some that are.
      • For instance, how many times did Cage throw himself under that truck before he got the timing right? And each subsequent time he had to do it knowing how much it hurt to be crushed to death.
    • Cage's first death is by far the worst. He blows up the Alpha Mimic with a mine, causing himself to be doused in its blood, which gives him the loop abilities...but also melts his face off.
    • Cage deliberately drowns himself in the dam to reset the loop after his gun and grenades are taken away. Imagine fighting every survival instinct in your body and forcing yourself to stay underwater for that...
      • What's truly terrifying is that, had he simply bled out, it would have been a permanent death: The alien's power is in his blood. Death by exsanguination sticks.
  • Cage probably died many many more times than hundreds considering Rita watched a friend of hers die over 300 times. The implication being that she also die more time than that in loops where she did not watch her friend die. Considering that Rita was already a soldier with some amount of combat training, all she had to do to learn was increase her knowledge base to include mimic killing tactics. Cage on the otherhand had zero combat skills and not only had to learn to do basic combat but also how to specifically kill mimics, so he probably died thousands if not tens of thousands of times.
  • The loop where Cage attempts to find and destroy the Omega on his own is a rather grand One-Man Army moment that becomes Harsher in Hindsight when you realize that in the time it took for him to reach the dam, Rita, J Squad, the rest of the invasion force, and the people of London were probably killed by the Mimics and would've remained dead if he had succeeded.
  • Rita had to watch a good friend (implied to be her lover) die every time she looped... all three hundred times. It also foreshadows that Cage has also watched Rita die many times over, and this is what finally causes him to snap and go on a one-man rampage across Europe to find the Omega alone. Not to mention how he learned about her... every piece of info he learned about her personal life was at the moment of her death. Also tearjerking.
  • Rita mentioning getting dissected by her superiors once.
    • She learns how to escape being strapped to a gurney in "three minutes flat", so she's probably been there more than once.
    • And how did she know she'd been dissected anyway? Was she still conscious when they started?
  • The Mimics' invasion of London. To begin with, the first sign is simply the power going off in the pub Cage is at. When he gets outside, there are sirens, explosions and people screaming, yet we don't see any of it. It's only when Cage gets to the bridge and sees the buildings on fire and the Mimics swimming en mass through the river that the horrible truth sinks in; the moment Operation Downfall fails, the Mimics swarm London. The whole seen is especially horrifying given how its tells you something is very much wrong without showing a thing at first, with the impression there's nothing that can be done about it before it washes over you.
    • The mass slaughter of which was obviously likewise done in every European city in Mimic-held territory.
    • The eerily quiet and very effective Scenery Gorn when they first reach Paris.
  • The possibility that there may be more Mimics floating around in space.
    • The light novel actually has an explanation for the Mimics: terraforming organisms genetically engineered by an alien civilization. The Mimics' adaptability as well as the time-manipulating ability is written in their genes. This means that sometime in the future, the actual colonizer will arrive and who knows what they will do when they find the humans.
      • This is however left ambiguous by the movie. Its not word-by-word adaptation as demonstrated by many tropes, and when Cage gets behind the lines, we see no traces of terraforming at all, Europe is left in exact same state as it was left by humans.

Top