All You Need Is Kill: a striking take on Edge of Tomorrow's source novel

Live, die, improve your gear, repeat

All You Need Is Kill, Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s 2004 light novel about a soldier stuck in a time loop, previously inspired the thrilling, hilarious 2014 Doug Liman film Edge of Tomorrow, where Tom Cruise dies over and over again while Emily Blunt belittles him. First-time director Kenichiro Akimoto adapts that novel again with the anime movie All You Need Is Kill, in theaters on Jan. 16, taking a more meditative approach to its characters while making its action more explicitly like a video game. The results are surreal and beautiful, but a little shallow, with a thin plot that changes tone too quickly.

While the original novel and Edge of Tomorrow open with plenty of action — starting with Earth already losing a war against extraterrestrials — All You Need Is Kill presents a distinctly post-COVID-19 view of an alien invasion, where the world has changed, but people still have to go to work. Rita (Ai Mikami) is sleepwalking through life, spending her days as part of a team trying to contain the impact of a mysterious alien plant dubbed “Darol” that landed in Japan a year ago. There’s a terrible trauma behind Rita’s inability to connect with any of her coworkers or take control of her life, but it only gets about a minute of development, seen in eerie flashbacks throughout the film.

Warner Bros. Japan tapped frequent collaborator Studio 4°C (Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox) to animate All You Need Is Kill. The studio steered clear of traditional anime or superhero animation styles, employing sharp edges and a purposeful ugliness more reminiscent of an experimental Adult Swim series. It’s an odd fit for a film packed with chase scenes and gory fights.

While the people look crude, Darol and the area surrounding are presented with spectacular detail. The plant’s bone-like white roots are coated with vibrant growths that have spread to nearby buildings. The whole neighborhood is covered in rainbow clouds that create a psychedelic effect with the same ominous beauty of Alex Garland’s 2018 film Annihilation. That threat literally bears fruit on Darol’s first birthday, when Rita’s shift at work is interrupted by the emergence of a swarm of flower-headed monsters that look like neon-hued Demogorgons from Stranger Things. Rita is quickly killed, but she wakes up again at the start of the same fateful day.

Rita goes through the classic time-loop arc, trying and failing to warn everyone about the coming cataclysm, then attempting to save herself. There’s a dark absurdism to her increasingly creative efforts to avoid Darol’s minions, which just result in her finding new ways to die. Her situation only improves when she begins treating her predicament as if she was in a roguelike video game, advancing a bit further on each run by memorizing her enemies’ movements and looking for better equipment to fight them with.

Akimoto and screenwriter Yuichiro Kido even tease the idea that Rita might actually be stuck in a video game, as she starts one round of battle with a significant upgrade. But then the film’s tone radically changes from a brooding survival film into a love story. That’s where Edge of Tomorrow eventually wound up, too, but that film’s heroes spent significantly more time together, making their connection feel organic. Rita’s relationship with time-looping tech expert Keiji (Natsuki Hanae) feels rushed by comparison.

Keiji has his own trauma: Like Rita, he felt trapped well before he started repeating the same day. Their temporal and emotional entanglement is reminiscent of Netflix’s Russian Doll, which focused on two people bonded through a time loop that is a metaphor for their shared psychological baggage. But at less than 90 minutes, All You Need Is Kill just doesn’t have the time to meaningfully develop its characters or give them emotional catharsis. In the second act, the movie cuts through the heavier ideas and copious bloodshed via some robot sidekicks that Keiji programs to help out, but they wind up being annoying distractions. The filmmakers should have just leaned further into the time-loop formula and let Rita and Keiji spend a day goofing off and getting to know each other before resuming their battle.

All You Need Is Kill isn’t as tight or fun a film as Edge of Tomorrow, but the visuals are stunning, and the moody tone makes it easy to get immersed in the world, even when the story doesn’t fully deliver on the premise. It’s a movie well worth watching once — it just isn’t the sort you’re likely to repeat over and over again.

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All You Need Is Kill is screening in select theaters now.