10 Reasons Edge Of Tomorrow Is The Most Important Blockbuster Of 2014

4. It Paves The Way For International Source Material

When looking at movie lists of the highest-grossing adaptations, you don€™t need even a single finger to count the number not written in the English language. Not one. Expand the list to include the lower 9-digit grossers and you start to see a little French appearing (Tintin, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), a sprinkle of German (The Reader, Perfume), the Russian titans (Doctor Zhivago, Anna Karenina), and the occasional Japanese horror (The Ring), but little beyond that. If Park Chan-wook hadn€™t adapted the original Japanese manga, Old Boy, into his notorious thriller, you can be sure Hollywood wouldn€™t have taken any notice and Spike Lee€™s English language remake would never have been made, itself a remake of the film rather than an adaptation of the original manga. Great literature is universal; its power transcends language. English is undeniably a global language, maybe even the global language, but great fiction exists elsewhere too, and Edge of Tomorrow is proof enough of that. It adapts Hiroshi Sakurazaka€™s light novel, All You Need Is Kill, translating the original Japanese into English, and turning it into one hell of a summer blockbuster, and it creates a model for more to come.