In his signature roles as Maverick in Top Gun and Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible movies, Tom Cruise has always found it easy playing the hero. But in new movie Edge Of Tomorrow his Bill Cage is much more reluctant to save the day – in fact, says director Doug Liman, this PR guy is something of a “coward”.

“We were trying to come up with the biggest anti-hero we could,” the Swingers and Bourne Identity helmer tells SFX. “In this case it was somebody who sold other people on fighting, but had no interest in ever fighting himself. He’s a coward and totally inept.”

In the movie (based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel All You Need Is Kill), Earth is at war with alien invaders known as “Mimics”. After a chance encounter with one of these Mimics, Cage finds himself thrown back in time to the day before a devastating battle every time he gets killed – a useful Groundhog Day-like “skill” that could help him learn how to win the war. Despite constantly revisiting the same day, however, Liman says the movie shouldn’t get boring.

“We always found ways to do things differently, so it never feels repetitive. That’s one of the things I’m most proud of in this film, given that it is the same day over and over again – there isn’t a moment that drags.”

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We know what you’re thinking: a film about a guy who wakes up, only to find he’s reliving the same day over an over? So far, so Groundhog Day. But Edge Of Tomorrow is different: starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, the action thriller is directed by Doug Liman, the director of Swingers and The Bourne Identity. GQ attended an exclusive preview screening and Q&A with Liman in London this week to get a glimpse of the final film before its release in May. Here’s everything you need to know.

The “jackets” are seriously cool. Robotic exoskeletons are in vogue at the moment – see Matt Damon in Elysium and the Robocop reboot, for example – but those in Edge Of Tomorrow might be the best yet. Designed by Pierre Bohanna, the designer behind the Harry Potter films and who happened to also help create Christian Bale’s Batsuit, the suits are enormous, clunking machines – but deadly in the right hands.

It’s surprisingly funny. You’d think a film about an alien invasion and repeatedly dying would be a major downer, but Edge Of Tomorrow is funny. Very funny. The dark humour (being immortal allows for plenty of physical comedy), combined with Emily Blunt’s comic chops, is a smart move and something often missing from recent sci-fi efforts (Cruise’s own Oblivion, for example).

There were some “production challenges”. Commenting on “some of the stories of turmoil on the set” (the film has been through numerous writers since its inception in 2010), Liman said simply, “I refused to do this cookie cutter movie.” He also talked about Cruise and the cast’s work rate, revealing that they shot seven days a week with two crews to get an extra 20 shooting days out of the schedule. One of the biggest problems about shooting a film set in one day? The British weather. “It can’t be raining if it wasn’t raining the day before.”

The title change isn’t a big deal. Though the film was originally named All You Need Is Kill like the Japanese novel the story is based on, some internet fans were upset when this was changed in Edge Of Tomorrow. “Right from the beginning I knew we were never going to call it [AYNIK],” says Liman, claiming the title “has nothing to do with story.”

Tom Cruise looks back to his best. From the early scenes we’ve seen, Edge Of Tomorrow is vintage Cruise, a mix of wit and out-of-his-depth nerves last seen around the time of Minority Report. As Liman put it in the Q&A, “There’s something for everyone: if you love Tom Cruise he gives this amazing performance… if you hate Tom Cruise, he dies like 200 times in the movie.”

Edge Of Tomorrow is out on 30 May.

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