Tom Cruise Filming Halts Trafalgar Square

Filming for the upcoming Tom Cruise science fiction movie All You Need Is Kill closed down London's Trafalgar Square on Saturday. Studio Warner Brothers brought in tanks to shoot several action scenes while tourists watched eagerly from a safe distance.

The film co-stars Britain's ubiquitous Emily Blunt, along with Aliens star Bill Paxton, Charlotte Riley and Jonas Armstrong. Based on the titular Japanese young adult novel, it sets up a Groundhog Day-style premise where a rookie lieutenant colonel named Bill Cage (Cruise) is forced to fight the same losing battle against alien invaders again and again, experiencing horrifying death countless times. Having started out without a single day of combat experience, Cage slowly begins to morph into a battle-hardened veteran with the skills and knowledge to potentially fend off the extra terrestrial Mimics. Blunt plays a special forces veteran who has taken out more of the aliens than anyone else.

While Cruise has struggled with his private life recently, his movie career is on something of a high following the $694m success of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol in January.

As well as All You Need Is Kill, he is due to star in sci-fi tale Oblivion in 2013 and will shortly be seen as former military policemen Jack Reacher in a film of the same name, based on Lee Child's successful series of novels. The latter feature, directed by The Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, is due out on 21 December in the US and Boxing Day in the UK.

All You Need Is Kill, directed by The Bourne Identity's Doug Liman, is due out on 7 March 2014.

This article was written by Ben Child, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 26th November 2012 12.49 Europe/London