If you have Tom Cruise in your movie, people are going to want to see Tom Cruise. Indeed, the actors’ visibility while wearing the exosuits was a critical requirement. “ is more taking its keys from actual developments that the military is doing and going back into more traditional forms and shapes that just convey more mechanics and hydraulics rather than slick engineering.”Ĭruise provided pre-shoot creative input to the team, reportedly proposing that the armor ought to register with the same emotional impact often captured in war photography: a bleak toughness that also speaks to the humanity of the individuals venturing out into the battlefield. “They are not shiny, slick, beautiful designs,” specifies production designer Oliver Scholl in the home video release bonus featurette Edge of Tomorrow: Weapons of the Future. Ultimately, both Liman and Cruise lobbied to approach the suit as practically as possible.Ĭollaborating with a number of departments, prop master and suit modeler Pierre Bohanna oversaw the design of the suits. Per a profile in issue #139 of Cinefex magazine, the filmmakers did initially consider outfitting the performers in minimal armor and tracking the majority of the suit digitally. The key challenge of the exosuits was creating an armored suit that was both credible as a piece of military equipment and functional as a camera-ready, stunt-proof costume. The exosuits in Edge of Tomorrow are, with some minor CGI exceptions, an entirely in-camera practical costume. It would be wild if they genuinely built these things. Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt pinwheel through the air like skipping stones in these things. Visually, it is impossible not to assume that the suits are a digital effect. The suits are a burdensome mess of pistons and gadgetry, an ambulating armory to a gifted soldier and a deathtrap to an untested one. The exosuits in Edge of Tomorrow are cumbersome, unrefined, and hulking a hastily-made product of a military force scrambling to match a superior enemy. Now trapped in a mysterious time loop, Cage relives the invasion over and over in a seemingly endless cycle of life, death…and desperately trying to figure out how his mechanical armor works. After the effort proves a colossal failure, he dies, drenched in the corrosive blood of an unusually massive alien creature. In Doug Liman‘s sci-fi action flick Edge of Tomorrow (2014), a PR man with no military experience named William Cage ( Tom Cruise) finds himself in the middle of a surprise attack against an alien invasion that threatens to destroy the planet. But it also means that some amazing practical effects work gets handwaved or, at the very least, goes underappreciated. And it’s a hunch that tends to prove correct. Given CGI’s prevalence these days, it’s usually a safe bet to assume a special effect is computer-generated. This entry explains how they built and filmed the exosuits for Edge of Tomorrow. Welcome to How’d They Do That? - a monthly column that unpacks moments of movie magic and celebrates the technical wizards who pulled them off.
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