It used to be that shameless, live-action Hollywood adaptations followed their Japanese animated counterparts rather than preceding them, but as the world of “All You Need Is Kill”(Original title: Ôru yû nîdo izu kiru, 2026) is quick to show, timelines are a fickle thing. This particular timeline is, of course, mostly a factor of Hollywood merely jumping the gun on one of its Eastern counterparts’ many treasure troves of adaptable reading material, as Doug Liman found himself developing a Tom Cruise vehicle in “Edge of Tomorrow” from the pieces of a Japanese light novel that the folks back home were simply in less of a hurry to adapt on their own terms.
Not only, then, does Kenichiro Akimoto’s directorial debut stand in the unique position of being comparable to a preexisting American adaptation of the same story, but also in the even rarer position of facing this comparison as something of an uphill battle. The Liman/Cruise sci-fi production may have been a notorious financial bomb way back in 2014, but equally reputed is the fact that its monetary failures were undeserved in the face of such a surprisingly spry and humorous stateside blockbuster. But when it comes to high-concept science fiction, few arenas are as fertile and conceptually rewarding as that of Japanese animation.
Retaining the superb title of its source material that the Americans famously discarded, “All You Need Is Kill” begins much earlier in the world of the story, well before anyone even has an inkling of what’s to come. Even though an entire year has passed since the extraterrestrial force dubbed “Darol” crash-landed on Earth and sprouted up like a centuries-old, ash-coloured tree, the stagnant visitor has remained entirely dormant behind an electromagnetic field that prevents close study, leaving the world at large unable to do much but accept its presence and mine its peripheral roots for research (or economic?) purposes.
This much changes on that one-year anniversary, when Darol lets off some mysterious pulse that suddenly sends an endless series of alien foot soldiers to lay waste to humanity. This instant slaughter comes for all, including the generally aloof Rita (Ai Mikami), who, upon unexpectedly killing one of these foot soldiers, finds herself reawakening to the same morning. No matter how or how often she dies, she always wakes up to the same AM, unable to break the time loop and left to figure out what exactly is actually happening to herself and the world around her.
At the risk of making this entire review a 1:1 comparison between “All You Need Is Kill” and its American counterpart, the shifts in focus are at least noteworthy insofar as Akimoto’s version seems to deviate further from the source material than Liman’s version, and consequently offers its own intriguing spin on the material. Rather than focusing on a fresh recruit in the United Defense Force tasked with fighting the long-established threat (as is also the case in the original story), this version follows that character’s would-be mentor figure before she takes on such a status, as this entire situation develops with nobody ahead of her to explain the rules.
The result is a film that, across its sub-90-minute runtime, spends much of its energy on developing Rita’s awareness of the sudden onslaught through various, often amusing means—her failure to convince others of the attack, her training to develop stamina in her clunky battle suit, and her choice of weapon to kill the aliens. It’s a decently engaging avenue for a piece of story development that, in other versions, would simply be relegated to the exposition of an already-experienced Rita, but “All You Need Is Kill” treasures the containment of its scenario, never leaving the confines of the immediate radius of Darol’s imminent massacre.
What this also means is that the film comes to feel somewhat truncated in its eventual focus, particularly as Rita eventually buddies up with Keiji (Natsuki Hanae), a timid tech wiz who, by complete happenstance, wound up in the same time-loop as Rita at the exact same moment. Their budding friendship and mutual development as they come to piece the situation together one day (the same day…) at a time leaves little room for the more sombre pieces of inner turmoil that Akimoto sprinkles in bits and pieces.
A climactic mutual trauma dump appears primed to take advantage of the preceding reticence for the film (by virtue of their characters) to open up, but the breakneck pace of the feature leaves little opportunity for these emotional bombs to hit their own intended blast radius.
Given the fact that this is an anime adaptation, though, Akimoto can at least take solace in the fact that “All You Need Is Kill” is given an inherently distinct visual dimension to explore the fluidity of its many attacks through the prism of its relatively restrained design. Japanese animation house Studio 4°C takes on development duties, and while their particular visual patterns are typically better-suited to the angular, destitute sparseness of their more revered “Tekkonkinkreet,” the company’s more naked approach to character design—not as warm as the works of Studio Ghibli, as sombrely textured as Mamoru Oshii, or as blindingly polished as Makoto Shinkai—adds a sense of effective simplicity befitting a film of this moderate apocalyptic scale.
One hesitates to assert whether or not this source material required an adaptation that would “get it right” amid the tumultuous release of “Edge of Tomorrow,” but if nothing else, Kenichiro Akimoto’s rendition of “All You Need Is Kill” finds its own sense of drive beyond the mere fact of being a home-grown production of what was once abducted by the studio suits on the Hollywood backlots. For a film quite literally built on the premise of endless repetition, there are certainly worse connotations that could come with the proclamation that “we’ve seen this one before.”
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