With Tom Cruise!
Ok, so when this project was first announced, I was excited. I got a hold of the book (also titled All You Need is Kill) and tore through it like some sort of spinning devil from Tasmania. It was pretty damn great. The concept of the soldier in a semi mech suit fighting off aliens in a continuous time loop played out so well on paper that I thought that this film was going to be a sleeper hit akin to District 9.
Then Dough Liman was announced to direct. Cool. I like Liman’s work. The guy has range. You go from Swingers to Go then to The Bourne Identity and tell me you don’t have range! Then Tom Cruise was cast. That’s where I said “what?” If you read the book, the protagonist is a shock trooper in the Japanese military. Point being Japanese. But I accept that some changes are to be made. But Cruise is 50 years old and the main character is barley in his 20′s. Finally, Emily Blunt is cast as the female lead. I’m fine with that.
So now, March 14th, 2014, All You Need is Kill (I’ll expect a name change eventually too) has been set for Tom Cruise’s big action fest. Warner’s has released this synopsis along with the announcement of the release date:
The story unfolds in a near future in which a hive-like alien race, called Mimics, have hit the Earth in an unrelenting assault, shredding great cities to rubble and leaving millions of human casualties in their wake. No army in the world can match the speed, brutality or seeming prescience of the weaponized Mimic fighters or their telepathic commanders. But now the world’s armies have joined forces for a last stand offensive against the alien horde, with no second chances.
Lt. Col. Bill Cage (Cruise) is an officer who has never seen a day of combat when he is unceremoniously demoted and then dropped—untrained and ill-equipped—into what amounts to little more than a suicide mission. Cage is killed within minutes, managing to take an Alpha down with him. But, impossibly, he awakens back at the beginning of the same hellish day, and is forced to fight and die again…and again. Direct physical contact with the alien has thrown him into a time loop—dooming him to live out the same brutal combat over and over.
But with each pass, Cage becomes tougher, smarter, and able to engage the Mimics with increasing skill, alongside Special Forces warrior Rita Vrataski (Blunt), who has lain waste to more Mimics than anyone on Earth. As Cage and Rita take the fight to the aliens, each repeated battle becomes an opportunity to find the key to annihilating the alien invaders and saving the Earth.
They’ve kept a lot except for everything involving Cruise’s character. I have a feeling that this film is going to suffer because of that. And don’t get me wrong. I l l0ve’s me some Tom Cruise, but I can buy him more as a secret agent or as some other manic character, but I think his days of pulling off tough guys like a solider, are done. Man’s a great actor, but he needs to start changing his direction a bit.
