If anyone recalls the 2014 Tom Cruise film Edge of Tomorrow, it was actually based on a Japanese light novel titled, well, All You Need Is Kill. Now we have a new adaptation, by the old title, in the medium of anime. Any questions?
Well, here are some answers. As of this writing, All You Need Is Kill is in theaters, which is where I saw it, so naturally there aren’t going to be the customary screenshots in this review. It’s also very much a different beast from Edge of Tomorrow, having a different setting, a different vibe to its enemies, and a drastically different climax.
For this version of All You Need Is Kill, the story begins with the arrival on Earth of Darol, a gigantic alien plant that begins to spread xenoflora from its landing site in Japan. However, Darol doesn’t exactly seem hostile nor particularly active, so for the time being, all is well.
One year after Darol’s arrival, we pick up following Rita, who works with the crews that cut back Darol’s spreading roots, containing the plant. After a bit of a bad day (not that such seems to be unusual to her), Rita finds that all hell breaks loose when Darol launches forth its spores, which hatch into giant killer plant monsters. In her panic, she seems to end up mutual-killing one of the monsters, and a flash of crimson root-like light similar to the one that engulfed the Earth at Darol’s arrival washes over her.
And then her alarm is going off again, and she wakes up at the start of the day. Rinse, repeat. Rita tries to warn people, but of course nobody believes that she’s been looping the day or that Darol is suddenly going to start spawning monsters. Rinse, repeat. Well, if there’s nothing she can do, she might as well try to get away, right? Rita tries quite a few methods to get out of the area, but none of them manage to get out of the disaster area or avoid her getting killed. Well, if that’s how it’s going to be, Rita is determined to fight back. She starts training with the “jacket” (powered exoskeleton suit) she was using for work, so that she’ll be able to fight in it. Death by death she upgrades from unsteady rookie to capable badass and trades up her weapon of choice until she manages to get a handle on a giant two-handed axe that seems to get the job done.
Despite her personal progress, though, she seems to be hitting a dead end, until she notices that someone else is acting different. This causes her to meet and fall in with Keiji, a young man who got caught up in the same incident that Rita did. He’s not as brave or as strong as Rita, and considers her to be his hero, but at the same time it turns out he has actually been helping, doing things like providing the giant axe and tuning her suit for combat.
At first, Keiji tries to act as mission control for Rita, having figured out that one Darol monster is on a different frequency than the others. This fails miserably, so a couple deaths later they start getting Keiji trained up to fight alongside Rita.
Bit by bit, they get more competent, more in sync, and ever closer to their goal of taking out the special monster. However, when they finally manage to do it… time loops again. They’re not out yet, which crashes our heroes down to an emotional low.
There, they manage to find a researcher, who believes their story and analyzes them to come up with a theory. The idea is that both of them now resonate with the core of Darol, and that Darol is attempting to assimilate them, which it will manage after not too many more loops. Thus, they need to climb the main trunk and take out the core before that can happen.
On what is allegedly set to be Rita’s last loop, the two make it up to the core and attack it, only for it to protect itself with some kind of force field, Darol begins to bloom, and the two heroes fall downward. Now far from their goal, Keiji has an idea. He briefly overpowers Rita and synchronizes with Darol, believing that as they assimilate into a single being, Rita can kill him to kill Darol through him.
Well, Keiji’s appeal to Darol seems to work, and thus Rita is forced to fight to the death against the one person she’s actually come to care about, ultimately resulting in Keiji dying in her arms. Time resets one last time, revealing that Darol has wilted, its death being carried back with Rita. At first, though, she can’t find Keiji, and comes to believe that he died with it. However, at the very end, we see that he’s simply lost his memories of the loop, allowing them to potentially reconnect and giving the picture a happy ending.
Now, as is typical of even a spoiler summary review, I’m leaving a lot of meat out. After all that takes, what, a couple minutes to read as opposed to an hour and a half of movie? A lot of this comes in the form of visual storytelling, both for the harsh action scenes surrounding Rita’s repeated deaths, and in the elements that get out more of her backstory of having been nearly killed by her mother.
The imagery in this film is brilliantly used. The human designs… take a little getting used to, but you’ll mostly be familiarized with them by the time Darol strikes. There are a lot of close-ups of Rita’s eyes, which are given a very triangular design that’s echoed in the structure that binds her, Keiji, and Darol. And there’s a lot of water imagery, communicating both how Rita feels in life and how she has to face up to her mother’s attempt to get rid of her by drowning
The Darol plantoid monsters, as well as the environment that the main body has xenoformed, are very beautifully done as well, and the use of colors throughout really helps make things pop and drives the story as a visual experience.
Compared to Edge of Tomorrow, I feel like there was less of a focus on tactics and planning out a “perfect run”, which most of the loops taking place during scenarios more like training montages than anything else. On the other hand, the characters were more likable and played off each other extremely well. Perhaps because they had some shared basis of experience, I felt a good deal more for Rita and Keiji than I did for Tom Cruise and the Emily Blunt Rita. It also really leveraged the new scenario (unique to this version) that neither was a soldier before the looping began, meaning that they’re out of their depth and we have to (and get to) see their wellspring of determination without much being assumed. On the whole, I didn’t dislike Edge of Tomorrow, but I think All You Need Is Kill is probably the stronger film.
I can’t comment on how either is as adaptation since I have not read the novel version of All You Need Is Kill, and based on summaries both films took heavy liberties with the plot and characters in order to shift it to a cinematic format, but I like the anime version’s liberties taken just a little bit more.
This is a weird one in that by the time this review runs, All You Need Is Kill will probably still be in theaters, but on the whole I’d rate it an A- and suggest that, as much as the movie is a visual spectacle, it’s one you might even want to see on the big screen if you’ve still got a chance.