Compare & Review: Edge of Tomorrow / All You Need is Kill

This compare & review is a triple feature!

First, we have Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt movie that I’m guessing most people are familiar with that came out in 2014. Then there’s the light novel it’s based on, All You Need is Kill, written by Japanese author Hiroshi Sakurazaka and published in 2004. And lastly, the manga adaptation of the light novel written by Ryōsuke Takeuchi and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, to coincide with the film’s release.

Many of you might not be familiar with what a light novel is, so I’ll explain that first; A light novel typically refers to a short Japanese novel geared toward a younger demographic and often includes a few illustrations. There are exceptions to this, as the All You Need is Kill light novel contains no illustrations, and it’s aimed at a slightly older demographic. It’s a novella by Western standards, but I’ll refer to it as a light novel for the same reason I’ll be calling its illustrated counterpart a manga and not a comic.

Edge of Tomorrow was my first of the three versions, and since at the time I frequented the manga sections of bookstores, I saw the manga adaptation of All You Need is Kill often enough that I decided to pick it up after watching the movie. I had no idea the light novel even existed until I started doing research for this review. The manga was created to release alongside Edge of Tomorrow, but it’s a direct adaptation of the light novel, meaning Edge of Tomorrow is the odd man out, though all three share the same basic premise:

The creatures called mimics came from outer space and began attacking Earth. All attempts at communication with the alien aggressors failed, as it seemed all the mimics want to do is eradicate humanity. The United Defense Force is established, bringing the world together against the mimic threat and Jackets- mechanical suits humans can wear to augment strength, power, and weaponry- are created to help even the odds in the war.

Our main protagonist is a newbie to combat, and on his first time out, he’s mortally wounded by a strange mimic, though he ends up taking it out shortly before he dies. This is when the protagonist wakes up and slowly realizes he’s going through the day all over again ala Groundhog Day, though this loop starts thirty hours prior to his death. Every time he dies, the loop begins again, and on the battlefield, there’s plenty of opportunities to die. Stuck in this loop, he must figure out a way to break free. Using the loops to his advantage, the protagonist might just have the tools he needs to free himself and strike a heavy blow against the mimics.

The light novel and the manga follow exactly the same plot. The only things that really change are the mimics’ appearance and how sexualized they make the Rita character (The manga dedicates more than a couple pages to this specifically). in the movie, the mimics are a chaotic thorny mass of twirling appendages. In the light novel, they have four legs, a tail, nearly as tall as a human, and have been compared to frogs by the civilian population. The manga mimics have the most radical appearance of the three, being levitating balls with a giant human looking mouth as their only feature.

The manga mimics are my least favorite of the bunch. They look less alien and more supernatural. The way they float and look really reminds me of the angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion. The other two mediums better portray the alien, biomechanical creatures that they are, though I can only assume the Edge of Tomorrow mimics (EoT mimics from now on) are biomechanical like their light novel counterparts, as the movie leaves their origins a complete mystery. We’ll get to that later.

I will say the manga is my least favorite of the three. I’m not saying it’s bad, but I would only suggest reading the manga over the light novel to the subset of people who only read manga. The light novel (LN from here on out), just does everything better, with the exception of fan service; From a busty cook, to illustrations of Rita in skin-tight suits, the manga is the one with the most sexualization. It’s not overdone or gratuitous, it’s just an expected part of the medium and demographic. And if that’s a plus for you, then I’d be doing a disservice to this review. There are also plenty of badass looking pages and a few gruesome deaths if that's your thing. But for story, the manga is a trimmed down, more compact version of the LN. It tells the story it set out to, and does it well given its limitations for sure, but I’m personally picking the LN over the manga every time.

There’s so much characterization and knowledge that’s lost between the LN and manga, and also a whole lot of F-bombs. Since the manga was made in conjuncture with the PG-13 rated film, most of the course language was left out of the manga. The LN also gives you a better sense of a soldier’s point of view in the mimic war than both the manga and the movie. The manga is still an enjoyable experience, and I encourage you to read it if that’s your thing, but if you’re a book reader, or plan to read both versions, check out the light novel first. As for how they both hold up to the movie Edge of Tomorrow…

I am going to practically ignore the manga when it comes to comparisons unless it’s specifically stated. LN and manga are just so similar in content, I’d be wasting my time otherwise. So for book versus film, we’ll start at the beginning. I’m not going to go too deep into spoilers here, but I do need to talk about the first few scenes and chapters of both to highlight a few key differences.

The books start us off right at the start of the battle. This is just one battle of many since the start of the mimic war that started twenty years ago. There are several fronts of this war on several continents. This is just another day, and Keiji Kiriya is just another fresh recruit. The fight quickly begins and Keiji meets his demise at the hands of an odd mimic, but not before he kills it. Keiji suddenly wakes up thirty hours prior to his death and soon realizes the day is playing out exactly as it had before.

In the movie, we follow Major William Cage, an officer of public affairs as he takes a helicopter in for a meeting with General Brigham to talk about the upcoming battle. This battle is supposed to be the turning point of the war. A surprise attack that will push the mimics back and give humanity a massive victory, one which it sorely needs. It’s been five years since the mimics appeared and they have claimed most of Eurasia.

Genera Brigham tells Cage he will be sent to the beach where the invasion into mimic territory will begin, to film the battle. Cage, a self-admitted coward, attempts to blackmail the general to escape his fate, only to find himself arrested and shipped out to a military base where he has been labeled a deserter, a liar, and an officer impersonator. It isn’t long before Cage finds himself on the battlefield with no training, no knowledge of fighting, and swiftly killed by an odd mimic, but not before he manages to kill it first. He awakes on the military base and soon finds out that the day is playing out exactly as it had before.

I’ll just touch upon a few minor changes the initial setup didn’t cover: The reasons why the protagonist killing the strange mimic throws Keiji/Cage into the loop is slightly different; Cage got the mimic’s blood in him, which infected him and allows him to start over after his initial death, whereas Keiji’s is a bit more… well, when Keiji killed the mimic it sent out a tachyon burst(time travel shenanigan particles) that his brain intercepted and now forces him to repeat the previous thirty hours after his initial death.

Another difference you’ve undoubtedly noticed by now is their names. Keiji is the name of the protagonist in the books, and Cage in the movie. The books take place in Japan and Keiji is Japanese. The movie is set in Europe and Cage is American. But the name Cage isn’t something the movie people just pulled out of nowhere. In the LN, Keiji specifically mentions Americans pronounce his name as Cage, so it’s more of a nod to the source material than anything else. The movie has several little nods like this one that most wouldn’t even recognize as such. There are no ham-fisted “haha look, we made a reference” moments in the movie. Nothing that wouldn’t make sense if you hadn’t read the source material. The best way to do it.

And that brings us to another minor difference that doesn’t change the story; Jackets. In the books, Jackets are full suits of armor that cover the wearer from head to toe. In EoT, Jackets are practically just the frames. A little extra support and strength, but leaving a lot of the squishy human exposed underneath. I’m sure it was a practical choice by the movie crew to save on money while also allowing the actors and actresses to show their faces. Most studios want their people on full display. It makes it easier for the people to emote, and for the audience to connect with them.

Speaking of… I really wished the 2012 Dredd film got a sequel. It’s a really underrated film, and Karl Urban kept his helmet on the entire time. Weird to think of him being the same as the Karl Urban starring in The Boys, with all his crazy facial animations. Anyway…

Now we’re going in a little deeper, but still spoiler free. I’ll mention when we’re about to get to those. The next subject I’m bringing up is brought to you by your high school literature teacher; theming!

The books start off making sure you know war is shit. It sucks to be a soldier. Keiji enlisted willingly, trying to find his place in a world where war has been a normality for most of his life, and he’s just another soldier until he’s killed and thrown into his first loop. From there, he quickly decided he won’t stop until he’s killed every mimic. He’ll continue to get stronger- he can’t physically get stronger, as his body continuously is reset when he dies, but he trains his mind, skills, and reflexes. We are just going to have to ignore the fact that Keiji’s brain is immune from the time loop amnesia while his muscles aren’t. Suspension of disbelief is very important if you’re reading the LN. There are a lot of technical aspects, particularly with the way the mimic time loops work, that you just can’t think much about without ruining the experience. EoT negates a lot of these issues by keeping the mechanism responsible for the time loops a lot simpler.

Cage isn’t a fresh recruit, technically. He’s a part of the PR firm for the war, making mass casualties and a losing war appealing to the public as they need more and more people to enlist. He’s admittedly not a fighter, and knows far less about combat than Keiji does. Cage quickly proves he’ll try anything to escape getting anywhere near the war, but even after accepting his fate, Cage’s goal remains to get out of the battlefield, until he connects with Rita, who points him in the right direction. The cost of war in the film is irrelevant, it seems. A whole continent has been claimed by the mimics, yet absolutely no attention is given to the ramifications of that. The narrative is focused on Cage and his growth as a character. It’s not the world that matters, but him, which is in stark contrast to Keiji, who, without getting into spoilers, has to sacrifice much more for much, much less.

Narratively, there’s also quite a bit of difference. The books start off right at the beginning of the battle, and then moves on to the thirty hours before that, where Keiji’s loop always restarts. We never see his life before that point. Edge of Tomorrow starts before Cage’s reset point, which was smart for the movie to do, because it shows what kind of person he is before he’s thrown onto the battlefield. It also serves as a good way to get exposition to the audience and sets up things for future scenes.

The light novel can get away with narrating the needed exposition during a battle, whereas to get the same info across the same way in the movie would feel clunky. At worse, EoT would have had to resort to an infodumping screen crawl or a disembodied voice explaining the situation, and that’s just nowhere near as compelling. So once again, the people working on the movie knew what they were doing and made changes that would suit their differing medium far better than other poorly received movie adaptions.

Cage was a more interesting character than Keiji, who quickly became one-note once he got his feet firmly on the ground, though everyone else who wasn’t Cage got it worse in the movie than in the books. Rita, our second protagonist, gets a few chapters dedicated solely to her backstory in the manga, and you spend a bit of time in her point of view in the LN. While we never learn her real name in the books, (she stole an ID to enlist when she was too young to do so,) Emily Blunt’s Rita mostly stays an enigma in everything except how much she wants the mimics dead.

The minor character also get more of a spotlight in the books, though the books do cheat by basically replacing the handful of members of J-Squad, the squad Cage gets thrown in with in the movie, with only two important characters Keiji interacts with on his squad.

The middle of the books and the movie are practically the same. Cage/Keiji learn how to best utilize their time loops while bettering themselves. It’s not until the climax starts to build that things really begin to change. Unfortunately, I can’t really get into that here in the spoiler-free section as their endings are so drastically different thanks to how the time loops work and how the mimics themselves operate, so I’ll keep this a bit short and vague.

The movie has a more optimistic ending. I’m not saying All You Need is Kill has a sad ending, but it certainly is more bleak. Edge of Tomorrow kept things more simple, so it didn’t leave me questioning a lot of the decisions the author had made writing the book, or wondering if I was just too stupid to understand. But EoT did make things a little too simple for my taste. I’d have loved a mishmash of the two climaxes for a perfect balance, but overall I think I like the movie’s ending more, though the themes and differences in their stories really do make them feel different enough where comparisons really aren’t reliable. Their endings aren’t better or worse than another, they’re just different.

I’m going to be the bluntest I’ve been with these Compare and Reviews of mine; I liked the movie better. It’s 2 hours long, but the time goes by quick. It keeps you entertained with humor as it sets up the plot, gives you an entertaining premise to keep you involved, and then manages to keep the stakes high. The acting is well done, and the effects still hold up well today- though the movie isn’t all that old to begin with. Most of the negatives I have for Edge of Tomorrow comes from the simple fact that they would have had to make the movie an extra 1-2 hours longer just to do all the other stuff I’d have wanted it to do. Then after you watch Edge of Tomorrow, you can read the light novel. It’s short, so the premise doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it plays with the time loops more than the film does, showing you that even just looking at something a different way could change the way other people interact with you.

Spoiler Time!

I’m about to go into stuff assuming you’ve already seen/read this stuff, or don’t care if it’s spoiled for you. I’ll start with a quick rundown of the plots of both the books and movie. Remember that the light novel and manga are identical in this regard.

The movie Edge of Tomorrow sees Officer William Cage get sent to the frontline of an upcoming battle with the mimics against his will, where he finds himself quickly killed and thrown in a time loop. He uses the time loops to his advantage by memorizing ways off the battlefield until he has a run-in with Rita, who tells him of the Omega Mimic, the queen of all mimics. She then trains Cage until he finally gets the vision from the Omega that Rita was waiting for, that gives away the Omega’s position. Only the vision is a trap meant to capture Cage so they can bleed him out and rid him of their mimic looping ability, though Cage manages to drown himself and die, restarting the loop. With the knowledge that the vision was a trap, Cage, Rita, and their scientist buddy try to think of a way to find the real position of the Omega. Luckily, their scientist friend has invented a device capable of doing such a thing. They just have to break into the general’s office to do it, because it was taken from him. And that’s exactly what they do. Rita and Cage get the device, but they end up getting into a car accident shortly after using the device to find the Omega’s correct location, and then lose consciousness. Cage gets a blood transfusion to save his life- which incidentally rids him of his time loop ability, so the next time he dies, he’s dead for real. Because the government wouldn’t believe them, Cage and Rita have no choice but to plan what’s basically a suicide mission deep inside mimic territory. With the help of the squad Cage was initially forced into, they assault the Omega’s nest. All of his squad dies getting them to the Omega. Rita dies to distract an Alpha, and Cage gets close enough to the Omega to throw several grenades at it, though he is mortally wounded before managing to do so. The grenades go off, the Omega dies, but its blood envelopes Cage as he’s about to die. Cage then wakes up, with reset that starts all the way back at the beginning of the movie. All of J-squad and Rita are still alive and even unaware of what happened, but the mimics are all dead now. Cage immediately goes to find Rita. The end.

In All You Need Is Kill, Keiji dies on the battlefield, but ends up with the mimics’ time loop ability. He uses his ability to die over and over to train himself and get stronger. He eventually teams up with Rita and they kill Mimics together. Rita had been stuck in a loop several times, and so she knows how to get out of it. They have to kill a certain number of specific mimics called antenna mimics, and then kill the lead mimic. Eventually, they succeed, but as they kill the lead mimic, the loop still resets. Rita knows why, and when they get to the point where it’s just the lead mimic to kill again, Rita attacks Keiji. Due to her previous times looping using the mimic ability, she has become an antenna mimic herself, and so the only way to get out of the loop is for Keiji to kill her. And he does. He doesn’t want to kill her, but he sees the necessity in it. After the battle is over and the UDF is victorious, Keiji takes Rita’s place, going from battlefield to battlefield, abusing the mimic time loop to help win the war. The end. There's a little bit more to it than I simplistically described, but that's because a lot of it is character work on the part of Rita, and we'll get to that in a bit.

One of my bigger gripes about the books was how the loops worked, and to explain just what my problems with it were, I’ll have to delve into the mimics, as they are explicitly tied to the loops and both the books and movie mimics are different in certain ways. How they look I’ve already covered, so I’ll skip that and get into how they operate. I’m leaving out the manga mimics for this. It’s assumed they operate the same way the LN mimics do, but a lot of that information is left out, trimmed down, or never stated.

The LN and movie both have three types of mimics, and each type is comparable to the other version’s to a certain extent. Both versions originated from somewhere in outer space. All attempts at communication with them has failed. War is the only answer. It’s after this that things get a little different.

The movie mimics are alien life forms from outer space. That’s all that’s known about their origins. They came to Earth on a meteorite that crashed in Germany and they quickly spread from there, killing humans and destroying cities. What they’re doing with their claimed territory is never mentioned in the movie, but the shots we get of it, doesn’t look like they’re doing all that much with it but squatting in the ruins.

A lot of what is known about the LN mimics is presumed through the authorial narration, but is unknown by humanity: There’s an alien race out there someone in dire straights for a new planet, so they sent out a device to find worlds that were good enough for their own habitation. That device then stopped above Earth and separated into several pieces and landed. Most of these devices were scooped up by the nations that were landed on, but what happened to those pieces after that was never stated. However, one of those pieces landed on the bottom of the ocean where the alien nanobots stored within began their work. The nanobots then interacted with starfish, took some of their genetics, and evolved themselves from there. The mimics adapted after every conflict, growing a little bit stronger and tougher to kill. These Mimics eat soil. They eat the good soil and leave behind nothing but barren land. Their presence turns water toxic and green. They are attempting to kill off Earth’s inhabitants and terraform the planet to better fit the needs of their creators.

The first type of mimic, both in the LN and EoT, don’t have fancy code names given to them, so I’ll just refer to these as Basic Mimics. They are the footsoldiers, and they make up the vast majority of the mimic army. The only difference between the books and movies here, besides their appearance, is that the EoT mimics seem to be affected by the loop reset, meaning every time Cage dies, the mimics have no memory of the previous loops. In the LN, the Basic Mimics seem to remember previous loops. This means Cage can get away with simply memorizing a mimic’s location and attack patterns and take advantage of it, but Keiji will always be facing foes that cannot be exploited by such a weakness.

The second type of mimics are EoT’s Alpha Mimics and LN’s Antenna Mimics. They both play a role in creating the time loops, but the logistics are quite a bit different. In the movie, it’s simple: If you kill an Alpha, its death will automatically initiate a time loop. Cage kills an Alpha and its blood contaminated him right before he dies. This somehow enables him to take that Alpha’s place, so now when Cage dies, he’s the one that resets the loop. “Taking the Alpha’s place” is an assumption on my part, as the Alpha at the beginning is never shown again after its first appearance, despite everything else repeating. Another thing to note is that Alpha Mimics look different from their basic counterparts. They aren’t a hyper, always moving swirl of appendages with glowing orange bioluminescence, they’re a solid mass that looks like a cross between a lizard and a gorilla who swallowed too many blue LEDs.

Things get a little more complicated with the LN Mimics. The second tier mimics in the LN are called Antenna Mimic and they look identical to their basic brethren, though both Keiji and Rita mention they feel different. The manga gives the Antenna Mimic a little horn that looks antenna-y. Keiji’s first run in with the second type of mimic is similar to Cage’s. Keiji is mortally wounded by the Antenna Mimic, but he manages to take it out before he dies. But unlike the movie, blood transfusion is not how it operates. Apparently, just killing an Antenna is enough to get you stuck in a loop. There are a handful of Antenna Mimics on the battlefield, which is a bit odd to think about when, if all you have to do is kill one, people getting stuck in loops would be a far more common occurrence. But there are more of these mimics on a battlefield, because these mimics are a fail-safe for our next division of mimic.

The third type of mimic that works in conjunction with the Antenna Mimics in the LN is the Server Mimic. There is only one Server Mimic per battlefield, accompanied by its handful of Antenna variants. The Server Mimic is the one that sends out the signal that creates the time loop. The Antenna are the ones that pick up that signal, thus their name. This is why all Antenna Mimics must be killed before the Server, for if even one Antenna is left when the Server is killed, that Antenna will pick up the signal and start the loop over again. Why then, when Keiji killed an Antenna Mimic, did it send out a tachyon burst signal that his brain intercepted and transformed him into a functional Server Mimic in his own right? I have absolutely no clue. Don’t think about.

The EoT Mimics work quite a bit differently, and that starts with the name: Omega Mimic. The Omega Mimic is a singular entity, unlike the Server Mimics. If the Omega dies, all the mimics die, because everyone knows that all monstrous creatures that have hordes of offspring have evolved the ability to bring down its entire species with the death of a single member of its species. Sorry. It’s a particular trope I hate. Writers love to create massive insurmountable armies to build extreme tension, but then also have their cake too by giving the protagonists the ability to neatly save the day by making only a single enemy death necessary, negating the thing that made the threat so dominating and dangerous.

The Omega and the Alpha also seem to share the ability to start a time loop. This is where I go back to my assumption that Alphas don’t respawn when a loop starts. The Alpha that is killed is dead for good, which is why we never saw the one Cage killed again. That, or Cage just takes its place, which also effectively kills off that particular mimic. It has to work one of those two ways, because when Cage kills the Omega and is re-infected with its blood before he can die, his death restarts the loop just like before. But after restarting the loop with the Omega blood, the Omega never respawned, and since the mimics can’t survive without their Omega, all the lesser mimics died upon the restart of the loop.

I may not like the solution to the mimic problem in the movie, but I can at least accept and understand how it all works. The movie simplified the concept. It may be simplistic, but it works. Though apparently they’re trying to start up an Edge of Tomorrow 2, so we’ll see how they complicate things then. The LN mimics and the ending attached to it works as well, as long as you don’t think about it. Once you think about it, cracks begin to appear.

So in the movie, Cage became able to loop after becoming infected with Alpha Mimic blood, giving him Alpha Mimic powers. In LN, Keiji gains the power of an Antenna Mimic by simply killing one. It’s something Rita exploited to win all the battles she had against the mimics. She gets onto the battlefield, kills an Antenna and gains its looping ability, gets as much intel about the enemy and finds a way to save as many lives as possible, then dies. Then, on her first reset, she does what she has to to minimize casualties and kills the Antennas and then the Server, ending the loop and winning the battle.

So why then have more people not killed Antenna Mimics and entered a loop? The antenna mimics don’t hide. Well, they do, but they “hide in plain sight.” They seem just as active in combat as the basic mimics. The movie at least made the situation that allowed it to happen somewhat unique. The next problem comes from another film/book difference, that the LN Basic Mimics remember what happens in Keiji’s loops whereas the EoT Basic Mimics are reset with everything else* (The Alphas and/or Omega may possibly remember. One of them would have to, otherwise what benefit would a time loop do for you, unless it’s specifically the Alpha that gets killed that solely remembers, and since Cage took the Alpha’s place, it can’t be there to pass on new orders.) This immediately changes the narrative for the LN because they know Keiji is the looper. They make early attempts to kill Keiji, but why? Killing him will just reset the loop.

The last complication is this; So Keiji and Rita didn’t get mimic blood in them to facilitate the time loops. All they needed to do was kill an Antenna Mimic. According to the story, going through many loops begins to alter your brain and basically turns you into an Antenna Mimic yourself. But then why does Keiji dying restart the day? The restart only happens if the Server dies and there are Antenna to pick up the signal. Keiji would have had to become a Server. So kill an antenna mimic and you become a Server Mimic? But then that only applies to the person currently caught in the loop. Since Rita’s mind has already been altered, but it’s Keiji who’s stuck, Rita is considered an Antenna, not a Server, because if she dies, it doesn’t restart anything. But if Keiji dies, it resets the loop because he’s a Server. That’s the only way the whole thing makes sense, and you can connect those dots like I did, but why does it work that way? Don’t think about it.

A little note I’ll add here is that the LN specifically mentions that it is only the memories that travel back in time. Keiji isn’t literally respawning like in a video game, his memories are being transported back in time into his brain. That still doesn’t help the case of how the tachyon signals can alter a human brain when physical changes can’t take place, and one can argue building memories is a physical process, but the brain is mysterious and complicated enough that it’s easy to hand wave. Obviously, this can’t work the same way in EoT, as it’s the blood the affects the looping, not memories, so perhaps with EoT it is more like a video game respawn. Which, funnily enough, video game deaths was a big inspiration for the author when writing the light novel.

Now on to the finales.

The LN’s finale is heavily dependent on how the mimics work and operate. EoT’s ending, not so much, so we are going to start with the movie, since it’s not going to take up much time.

The EoT’s climax is simple. Cage and Rita need a Mcguffin to find out where the Omega is, which is in the General’s office in the city. They go there, using Cage’s looping ability to memorize the best way to get to the office. They finally get the Mcguffin, find out where the Omega is, but then get into a car accident. Cage loses consciousness before he can die and he’s losing blood. In the hospital, he gets a blood transfusion which eliminates his ability to time loop. So now they know where the Omega is, but Cage can no longer loop. Worse, if anyone kills an Alpha Mimic, it will reset time, but this time, Cage will be left out of the loop and have no memory of that loop. Or maybe he still would have his current memory, but no ability to loop himself. That’s unclear. Either way, they now only have one chance to kill the Omega.

Unfortunately, the only help he can get amounts to J-squad, which he was kind of an asshole to earlier in the day, but he convinces them to side with him thanks to his knowledge of things about them that he had learned over all his loops. It still ends up being a suicide mission. All his squad die getting him inside the Omega’s lair. Rita dies distracting an Alpha. And Cage is mortally wounded by the Alpha and falls deeper into the water, toward the Omega. But before Cage dies, he’s able to blow the Omega up with grenades. As Cage sinks in the water dying, the Omega’s blood envelopes him and he dies- suddenly he’s alive and back in time at the very start of the movie. No one died. The mimics are all inexplicably dead. Cage doesn’t get credit for the kill, but he goes straight to Rita, presumably to tell her all about it.

A coward becomes a hero. He ends the war and doesn’t get the credit for it, but he doesn’t care. Rita’s still alive and that’s all that matters. Not a bad ending.

In the light novel, Rita and Keiji don’t team up for a while. By that point, Keiji is an incredible fighter and Rita is as well. With the knowledge Rita gives Keiji, the two quickly form a plan- and it’s a much simpler plan than the film’s, since they don’t have to try to escape a battlefield and they don’t have to find some hidden alien hive queen. The two just need to kill a lot of mimics. They need to kill all the Antenna Mimics and then save the Server Mimic for last. Doing that should end the loop and defeat the mimic army.

There’s no memorizing patterns here, as the mimics remember what happened in the previous loop, so it’s just good ole mimic killing at its finest. They even manage to kill all the antenna mimic and when all that’s left is to kill the Server Mimic, they even manage to do that. Except that resets the loop and Keiji has no idea why. They know all the antenna were killed. It should have worked. It worked for Rita several times in the past.

When Keiji informs Rita exactly what happened- remember, her memory of the previous loop is completely wiped and she has to learn about Keiji from the beginning- she seems nonchalant. When it comes to training, she seems to put it off. When it comes to planning, she finds ways to distract him. She has never acted like this in any of the previous loops. She’s always been very eager to kill mimics. This is extremely reminiscent of the way Cage acted with Rita at the farmhouse when he knew the only way forward was for Rita to die.

Keiji ends up sleeping with Rita and they both awake in the top of the air traffic control tower (the base is in an abandoned airport) that Rita claimed as her own personal room. They are just about to enjoy a cup of coffee when the mimics attack. This is a big shock, because the mimics have never attacked the base in all previous loops. But last loop was the closest Keiji and Rita had come to ending the battle, and they must feel they have to attack now, while the two are the most defenseless.

This surprising and devastating attack just doesn’t feel threatening, because all Keiji has to do is die and restart the day over. Yeah, the mimics will know he knows of their surprise attack now and change tactics, but whatever he does would have to be better than what’s going on now. The excuse they use for why this loop has to be the very last one to make the reader think there are tangible stakes is as thin as the pages the story’s printed on.

The two barely survive the assault, but they make it out and begin hunting again. Keiji still hasn’t worked out why he looped last time, but there’s no time to think about it and eventually the antenna mimics are all taken care of. It’s just the Server left. That’s when Rita attacks Keiji. She’s attacking to kill him and Keiji has no choice but to fight back, and as they fight, Rita explains that living through the loops changes the human brain. Keiji is currently acting as a server mimic. That’s why, when he’s killed, it resets the loop. Rita had been an acting server mimic many times prior to this and her brain has been changed, but since she’s not the one looping this time, her brain is acting as an antenna mimic.

The only way for the loops to end, for the battle to be won, is for Rita to die. Keiji has to kill her. And he does. And then he kills the Server. The battle is won. There are mass casualties. The base is in shambles. The time loop is broken and humanity is victorious. There is no big reset that undoes all the damage like in EoT. No happy ending. All there is is more battles to fight and more mimics to kill and Keiji takes Rita’s place as the greatest mimic killer. The only thing he has to look forward to is more mimic fights, more time loops, and more death. He accepts his fate.

When comparing which finale I liked better, it’s really hard to say. If I had to give a simple, single word answer to which I preferred, I would say movie. I dislike the forced “last loop” of the LN and really wish the author had come up with a better way to increase the tension. I liked the slow burn relationship of Cage and Rita in EoT, but I thought the Rita and Keiji fight to the death was a really great surprise and a great moment for the characters who were so emotionally in touch with each other.

Cage’s happy ending reset may seem like a cop-out ending at first, but EoT really was all about Cage and his journey. It was a well-earned reward. And while the plot element of killing the Omega automatically killing all mimics was something I didn’t like, Keiji’s ending was far too hopeless for me.

On the surface, Keiji’s now a bad-ass mimic killer. He lost Rita, but the worst is ahead of him. He will have to endure the loneliness Rita experienced. He may have escaped one loop, but the rest of his life will be repeated over and over, just on different battlefields, with no known end to the mimic threat. Not to mention, if someone kills an antenna mimic on the battlefield before Keiji can, the only way the loop can come to an end is if the new looper kills Keiji, just as Keiji had to kill Rita. And then, even if Keiji avoids that scenario and ends up purging Earth of mimics, the aliens that sent the mimics to Earth are still out there and still in desperate need of the planet.

And now to characters.

Keiji and Cage: I’ve already gone over their major differences. Cage is a coward who eventually learns combat through sheer repetition. And he certainly gets over his cowardice, as proven by his willingness to go on the suicide mission that was the finale after he lost his looping ability. Keiji, on the other hand, can’t rely on memory because the mimics are always doing something different since they aren’t affected by the loop’s reset. The exception being when dealing with people. But Keiji isn’t interested in people. He uses the knowledge he’s gained through the loops to find the quickest and best way out of every social situation so he can start training as soon as possible.

Keiji eschews everything in exchange for getting stronger. We even get a scene where one of the sexy ladies on the base makes an incredibly obvious pass at Keiji and he refuses. He didn’t even have to work at it through multiple loops. It just happened incidentally, and he says no. Sex was a waste of time for him. He could have replicated what happened on following loops to get the same offer, but you’re left with the presumption Keiji only cared about killing mimics. Keiji does go to a pre-battle party the night before, and he seems to keep it a part of his schedule, but we aren’t shown any scenes from it.

Cage does spend time socializing, though it too is done off screen, so it’s a little weird when, trying to get J-Squad to get on board with Omega assault plan, he knows a lot about their personal lives. Obviously Cage had been through a lot of loops, and they can’t show everything, especially when the runtime was already two hours, so I’ll let it slide. At least there’s some kind of evidence of it happening.

The only on-screen socialization both Keiji and Cage actively seek is with Rita, though only after they find out they had also experienced the mimic loop. It’s never about sex, though. Even the manga, which wasn’t shy about showing off the female figure whenever possible, is extremely reserved when Keiji actually spends the night with Rita. You can presume what happened, but the panels don’t show anything, and neither does the LN.

Cage also builds a bond with Rita, but it’s never sexual- not that she would have allowed it to happen, loop or no loop. She knows about the loop, she’s been in the same situation as Cage, so he’s immediately drawn to her for that connection alone. She’s capable. She trains him. And they try to make it through the battlefield together. He watches her die. And die. And die. The film gets Cage’s feelings across excellently simply by keeping the camera trained on her as the montage of her dying and lying dead over and over and over plays. You feel Cage lose hope. You can tell he’s getting tired of the whole thing. This comes to a head with the farmhouse scene…

So far, the film has mostly shown Cage doing something he’s never done before in a loop. The scene may start with Cage blowing through interactions with precision that implies he’s done everything before, but fairly soon he’s in new territory. This is done to have actual stakes and danger. Unfamiliar territory. So when they get to the farmhouse and stumble upon the helicopter behind the farmhouse, they start looking for the keys. You’re given the impression this is Cage’s first time making it this far, and I didn’t even think to question why Cage keeps procrastinating, as it’s still in character for Cage to take his time. When he suggests they spend the night at the barn, you can’t help but think he might have other things on his mind other than defeating the mimics, especially when he lets it slip that this is not their first time here, which makes Cage look like an incredibly shitty person- until he reveals this is the end of the line.

They have been to the farmhouse a lot. And every time, either Rita dies, or he does. He’s tried everything and one of them always has to die for the other to escape. And since if Cage dies, the loop resets, that means they can only proceed if Rita dies. And if Rita dies and Cage succeeds, Rita is dead for good. Rita, angry and frustrated, and with her eyes on the goal, starts the helicopter anyway. True to Cage’s word, Rita dies when a mimic attacks.

After this last attempt, Cage decides he’d rather push on alone rather than lose Rita. Cage makes his way to the location they thought the Omega was at all on his own- and finds out it was trap. The Omega isn’t there, only an Alpha who was waiting for him. It plans to bleed him out and force him to lose the loop ability. After nearly escaping the trap- by drowning himself- he meets back up with Rita to come up with a new plan.

Rita and… Rita

Rita: Book Rita, aka The Valkyrie, aka Full Metal Bitch, aka Wargarita (don’t ask me, best I can come up with is war and margarita, war because she’s the best warrior, margarita because she’s cute/sweet looking? Someone help me out here.)

Both Ritas meet the protagonist basically the same way at the start of the story: Keiji/Cage is grievously injured and about to die. Both Ritas state he’s going to die and that they’re going to take his Jacket’s battery for her own use. But it’s how they both do it that sets their characters drastically apart. LN Rita says she’s going to wait until he dies to take his battery. She also asks a question to take his mind off the pain and panic of his injury. EoT Rita doesn’t wait. She strips Cage’s Jacket of its battery as she’s telling Cage he’s going to die and then runs off to fight more mimics.

LN Rita is an intimidating figure in her full suit of armor wielding a massive double-headed battle axe as she’s shown dismantling and killing mimics with brutal efficiency. But inside that Jacket is a compassionate tiny thing, a woman barely in her twenties, craving a connection to someone she couldn’t hope to have. She’s been through several loops and won many battles against the mimics since in the LN universe, the loops are easily exploitable. She’s a skilled veteran, head of the special divisions team that is backed by the government.

LN Rita is also given a backstory; She’s a girl from Pittsfield, Illinois, a southern town that I, a northern Illinoisan, had never heard of, but it does exist. What her real name is was never stated in the LN, only that she had used the ID of someone named Rita Vrataski. In the manga, her name is said, but it’s redacted. So all were left with is her hometown and the fact that she was too young to serve in the army, so she had to steal an ID to enlist after her parents were killed by mimics and she swore revenge on them.

The first time the Rita of the books accidentally gets trapped in a loop, it took her over 200 attempts to figure out what she had to do and escape. Since then, she has worked out a system that enables her to get herself put in a loop, find the best way to defeat the mimics with the fewest amount of casualties, reset the loop a single time, then claim victory and free herself on only the second try. She is skilled enough that she likely doesn’t even need to loop at all to defeat the mimics, but she tries her hardest to minimize human losses. Things only went awry in Japan and the LN’s story because Keiji managed to get stuck in the loop before Rita could. But despite her skills and her attempt at saving everyone, in her very first battle, on what would be the very last loop of her 200-some run, her mentor Hendricks is killed.

She hadn’t realized it until after the battle was over, the mimics defeated, and the time loop ended. It was the only time, in all those attempts, that he had died. It was there that she learned not all deaths can be prevented, but she could ease the suffering of those she couldn’t.

LN Rita is incredibly lonely. She cares for people, but no one can understand what she goes through, and so she keeps her distance. When she finds Keiji, a young man going through the same thing she went through, all those barriers she kept up break down immediately and she starts crying. There was a point in the story when the narrative was talking about Rita’s backstory, that it mentioned briefly that as a kid, Rita was very good at fake crying. I thought that might be a clue at some big twist involving how Rita really felt about Keiji, but her emotions seem genuine and nothing comes of that brief statement. Maybe all it was was something getting lost in translation.

EoT Rita, Emily Blunt, aka Angel of Verdun, aka Full Metal loud noise interrupts someone before they can say bitch  (the movie is PG-13 and won’t even say the word unless it’s covered over by a car honking or person shouting.)

Movie Rita is a woman whose backstory is largely unknown. We know she was caught in the loop once, during the battle of Verdun, which was the human’s only real victory against the mimics, even though it ended up only being a fake loss by the mimics to lure them into thinking humanity still has a chance, because Rita ended up bleeding out and getting a blood transfusion like Cage, and lost the power. The film tries to tell us she’s a battle-hardened veteran, but she dies in some ways that had me questioning her abilities. She’s certainly a colder, more uncaring version of Rita, and this is shown immediately when Cage is mortally wounded by the Alpha Mimic. In the film, Rita doesn’t care. She tells him he’s dying, takes his battery, and leaves. She’s not hostile, she just sees no purpose in small talk with a man who will die.

We know book Rita’s plan is to find the antenna mimic and trap herself in the loop, but what EoT Rita is doing is unknown. If she even has a plan. The change for this coldness likely has to do with Hendricks. LN Rita only had Hendricks, the person she cared for deeply, die once, though on the very last loop, movie Hendricks couldn’t be saved on any loop, regardless of how many times EoT Rita tried to save him. And so, in order to stop caring for anyone else and possibly losing them, she distances herself, and suggests Cage do the same to prevent the same thing happening to him.

She uses Cage as a resource. A tool to kill mimics, and she treats him as little more than that. Some feelings do end up breaking through, but all that amounts to is her telling him her middle name, and while that info isn't directly used in the movie, it’s presumed Cage will call her her real full name upon meeting her at the very end of the movie to prove all they’ve been through.

I wish the movie showed her being a badass more. The movie tells us she is, but puts little effort in showing us, seemingly relying on Cage for everything. They should have given her a giant battleaxe like in the books. Everyone knows an oversized melee weapon instantly makes you awesome.

Minor Characters: Everyone else really doesn’t matter all that much. LN Farell is an understanding, caring part of Keiji’s squad and trains Keiji in the basics of fighting. EoT Farell, played by the late Bill Paxton, is your stereotypical drill sergeant, though he is an enjoyable part of the movie. J-Squad, the squad Cage is put in, doesn’t really get much to them. There’s Lady That Talks With a Southern Accent, Big Dumb Guy Who Likes To Be Naked, and some other guys.

The LN does a better job of fleshing out its side characters, but there are less of them, focusing mostly only on Keiji’s bunkmate, Farell, and Rita’s mechanic- a role that was swapped out with the scientist guy in EoT. There’s the cook, too, but all she’s there for is boobs.

So there we have it. The light novel and manga All You Need is Kill is a good read. The movie Edge of Tomorrow is a great watch. My order of which is better remains movie, light novel, then manga, but any are great entertainment. I know as of writing this review, there is talk of an Edge of Tonorrow 2, with Emily Blunt suggesting a script exists, but who’s to say if it will ever materialize? We’ll have to wait and see, right alongside my hope for a Dredd 2.

I won’t be holding my breath.