Edge Of Tomorrow Concept Art Gives You A Close Up Look At The Mimics
This article is more than 2 years old
We don’t want to stop talking about Edge of Tomorrow because if we do we’re afraid that everyone will forget about it and it will die. Judging from the box office numbers, moviegoers largely ignored Doug Liman’s new sci-fi actioner, at least domestically—the film topped $100 million overseas. The Tom Cruise vehicle has been a critical darling, though, currently the proud owner of a 90% fresh rating on content aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. For those of you who saw, and enjoyed the film, we’ve got some concept art that you might want to take a look at.
In the film, an alien race called Mimics have invaded Earth and are generally making a terrible mess, mostly of Europe. The creature effects are pretty divisive, even among fans of the film. It isn’t the design necessarily, but the way they’re filmed and the way the move. They have this weird, jittery motion, that, when you consider that they can bend time to a degree, feels like it might have something to do with that. Regardless if that is the case or not, it is never touched on, but this concept art from Kevin Jenkins (Thor: The Dark World) gives you a good look at them.
There are a couple of different types of Mimics. You have the Alphas and the Omegas, which are essentially the big wigs and the ones that can mess with time, resetting the day as they need. These fellas are also way more rare. On screen, the bulk of the aliens you see are your basic, run of the mill foot soldiers. They’re the ones who get down to the serious business of killing Tom Cruise’s character, Bill Cage, over and over again. That’s not the only way Cage dies, but they certainly do their part.
Overall, the look involves many tentacles flowing behind them like sci-fi dreadlocks. They actually quite resemble the sentinel droids from the Matrix movies, with a healthy dose of H.R. Giger’s xenomorphs from Alien thrown in for good measure.
These images provide you with a much more static view of the creatures, and from them you can tell how Liman and the production designers really captured the look and feel in the final movie. The larger aesthetic is definitely present in these pictures.
One of the possible excuses given for Edge of Tomorrow underperforming is the bland, generic title. Based on a novel All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, and subsequent graphic novel, the film originally used that moniker, though they abandoned it along the way, probably because it sounds too violent. That was apparently the title used when Jenkins came up with these pictures, and especially considering the serious, grim looking pieces that involve those bulky exoskeletons, that seems like a way more appropriate name.
