ALL YOU NEED IS KILL
2026
Directed by Kenichiro Akimoto
Written by Yuichiro Kido (based on the novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka)
Well, this almost slipped through the cracks, as I'd convinced myself that not only was the new anime adaptation of All You Need Is Kill a 2025 release and hence a low priority—in my defense, this is technically correct, for it indeed did play festivals in mid-'25—but that even its American theatrical release occurred back in 2025, and this was obviously wrong, given that its Japanese wide release didn't even happen till January; so, apparently, it was almost simultaneously distributed on both sides of the Pacific, which feels like something hugely historically important happened nine months ago and no one's even mentioned it, so I assume what that must mean is just that I really wasn't on the trolley this time. But it is startlingly unusual; depending on what you count as Scarlet's "North American release," you could clock its Oscar-qualifying run at just a few weeks after being released in Japan—though I would not count that—but the last anime film I was hugely excited about, Suzume, still lagged by a torturous five months, not Kill's mere seven days. And so, if we put on our GKIDS executive hats, let us ask a pointed question: this is the one you were sure was gonna hit?
This may be a nonsense question the way I've framed it (I would assume that the performance at the Japanese box office plays some role in GKIDS' distribution decisions, but then, GKIDS comes off like they just like putting out major animation studios' cartoons and not-so-major animation studios' cartoons, regardless of their provenance or profitability), but, obviously, I wasn't really cosplaying as a foreign films distribution firm's executive there, I was setting up a rhetorical point. So: once you've watched it, there is nothing too outrageous about Kill, and frankly this a tiny bit disappointing, given how unlikely this movie was to have struck anybody, Japanese or American, as a "normal," on the basis of the first impression that its marketing was unavoidably going to give you with the extraordinarily aggressive stylistic choices that have been made front-and-center with its art style. Meanwhile—and I would bet that this did have something to do with the commercial calculus GKIDS made—Kill is an adaptation of the very famous 2004 light novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, and, you know, we've already got one of those, thanks to the underperforming-but-widely-liked 2014 Tom Cruise vehicle, Edge of Tomorrow, also known, apparently, as Live Die Repeat. And not to get too parochial about it—Japan is certainly entitled to make their own, and the perplexing thing is that it took 'em so long—but ours is better. Except for the title, obviously. I mean, that surely goes without saying.
You may, then, already know the basic premise—it's a time loop story about fighting an alien invasion over and over again—though Kill '26 is possibly the more complete overhaul of the top-level components of the novel's plot, kind of mashing the plot of the novel and the 2014 film into what you'd get if you did a prequel to All You Need Is Kill, focused upon its mentor figure, ace alien slayer Rita Vrataski (Ai Mikami). As you know, she didn't get there the usual way. But here's an oddness: what I would've written after that sentence is that "Rita is one of hundreds of civilians who've migrated to the crash site of the object dubbed 'Darol' by scientists, the giant plant-or-fungus-like organism that arrived on Earth (specifically Japan, natch) exactly 365 days ago, and has since done nothing but lay down roots and tower menacingly but impassively over the Kanto region. Rita has gotten work helping the research effort, but as she's a prole her job is pruning it with the help of an environmentally-contained mech suit." Except Wikipedia, anyway, tells me in no minced words that Rita is part of the United Defense Forces multinational military, something I'm fairly certain that this movie I watched 48 hours ago does not once expressly extoll, or even visually exposit, and only manages to be implied by the presumed fact that she's not a native of Japan, though the more important thing is that it doesn't feel remotely like a military unit or like a military situation (despite the dormitory-style quarters), and Rita doesn't feel even the slightest bit like a soldier; the weapons of the war to come are all basically repurposed logging tools, nobody even has a gun. So I think that page's editors are just interpolating the premise of the novel into their summary of the movie, and if that's not what happened, I think I'd have to think less of the movie itself for making this so gauzy, even spotting Japanese animation its customary extra-liberal attitude towards what constitutes "a depiction of a militarized setting."
Either way, Rita is a sad and lonely young woman who has spent the past year self-isolating—also not something I believe the novel does with this character, or with its original protagonist, but not exactly reinventing the feature anime wheels here—but that war does come, today, when Darol's fruiting body bursts open and its much-more-ambulatory seedlings run rampant, destroying all humans they see. Rita dies but not before bathing in the blood of one of these sci-fi monsters, which turn out to have special properties, sending her right into that time loop, returning her to 7:03 a.m. that morning, and thereby putting Rita through hell as she dies over and over, but affording her the chance to get very good at alien-killing, survive, and save everyone. Nevertheless, this remains largely theoretical—she gets better at killing Darol's monsters, but an endgame is totally out of sight, and matters become even more complicated and murky when she begins occasionally resetting even without dying, and realizes there's another looper in here with her, Keiji Kiriya (Natsuki Hanye). Together, they'll have to figure out how to destroy their enemy and end the loop.
So the main thing recommending this is also perhaps the main thing that scared people away (and it's worth mentioning that whatever the commercial hopes were for Kill, its American release was not any great success—it made about a fifteenth of what that last Shinkai movie did, for comparison—though I cannot speak to its performance in Japan), and that's its manufacture as a cartoon from Studio 4°C, pretty much the weirdest* or at least most intentionally off-putting major animation concern that Japan has going. What that means is what sometimes seems like a desperate, instinctual flailing to escape the bounds of conventional anime stylization—no two 4°C films I've ever seen have even employed the same unconventional stylization—and one may have questions about the appropriateness of imposing stylistic radicalism on what is, once you lay the time loop conceit aside, about as a stereotypical an anime set-up as it gets, e.g., bodacious broad lays into monsters with a battleaxe, probably in between musings on the nature of mech war, and arguably more stereotypical in the movie as it's been arrayed, once we arrive on the novel's repositioned protagonist. Well, recalibrate those expectations, because what we've got are character designs somewhat difficult to get a hold on, principally in the case of Rita, whose resemblance here to the (even-more-stereotypical, I guess) anime child soldier is a starting place for a character who sets the baseline for much of the secondary cast, a figure whose design mentality seems to have been to translate into hand-drawn digital animation a caricature of a human you built out of wire clotheshangers when you did not necessarily have access to a wire-cutter. This is somewhat reflected into the world, the world only being more solid by comparison, which is countervailed by how hallucinatory it is following its refashioning by Darol, whose goal is turn the entire planet into what it's turned this stretch of Japan into, a giant prog rock album cover splashed with woozy unnatural color everywhere.
This is probably the most blatant differentiation between this and Edge of Tomorrow, which was happy to exist, aesthetically, in gunmetal realism; and the most pronounced improvement thereon is inevitably the subordinate monsters that are the abiding threat, previously best described as "CGI tentacle thing" and now some Clark Ashton Smith-style (or Audrey II-style, if you prefer) evil flowers,** octopus-like in their own way due to their petals but more like an octopus mounted on a scorpion's body, and presumably Darol's offspring, afforded legs in order to disperse and begin the cycle over again. And these are swell examples of what digital 2-D animation can do, in their cleanliness (so in this respect they do feel extremely alien to the humans) and psychedelic but nonetheless stable colors, running about and frequently gushing purple blood over a trippy environment that's a fairly good example of the ongoing integration of Deep Canvas-like 3-D into Japanese animation; the Darol-colonized wilderness that's the main setting for action is basically flawless, with all the seams showing up in the "handheld" POV shots of the human spaces that aren't going to benefit from the hyperreality of it, but are also kept to something like a minimum. So there's a lot of spectacle, though as I said probably fewer wild swings than I expected from something announcing itself this loudly, with the same basic "fight the tie-dyed monsters in the weird forest" scenes offered in numerous helpings, which is of course the premise of the film, but there are gestures towards stylistic breakdowns into graphic-feeling abstraction (the crayon-scrawl of the red bolts of influence, for instance) that kind of feel like they should be a bigger fraction of an already strange-looking movie. It does eventually get there in a finale that I shouldn't say is inspired by Altered States' climactic backlighting metamorphoses, but that's a good way to describe it (so would, I guess, comparing it to the more mystical passages of Children of the Sea, which is obviously more proximate but I'd prefer to be reminded of Altered States); though this is also where the backdrops, CGI faking being a chalky graphic image, start failing us in a serious way.
All told, very cool-looking but not as such revelatory, and obligatorily repetitive, and if you're frowning now and saying "yes, it is obligated to be repetitive, it's a time loop movie and that's the pleasure and point," then I'd say "you should stop copying my diction, but that's exactly what I'm getting at," because the pleasure and point of a time loop movie is pretty bound up in keeping the viewer from ever feeling the same wearying tedium as the looper. I don't think Kill fails at that abjectly a level, to be clear—it is an 82 minute movie—but by the same token there shouldn't be even momentary dead air in an 82 minute movie, and there are quietly-persistent weaknesses to this adaptation along with a few blaring ones. Some of it is the sci-fi action: time loop movies are like "video games," it's said, and there's truth to that, but how'd you like to play a Mario game that was wall-to-wall goombas? Even if the goombas were extra-cool?
More of it is just that Rita is a pill, and while I mentioned "a secondary cast" very little about the story would change if they weren't here at all, we just wouldn't have as many onscreen demonstrations of the monsters' ability to turn live people into dead people, and we don't have a surplus of those anyway; so there's actually very little need for Rita to navigate her social landscape as a looper nor engage in capery hi-jinx to sneak into unauthorized places (she just goes to the sci-fi woodshed and picks out whatever she needs, you know?), despite this usually comprising, by volume, a great fraction of the fun of time loop stories; it should, at least, open up space for other kinds of looping playfulness but tends to foreclose them instead. (This is on top of a minor quibble, that during the "what the fuck is happening?" phase of Rita's experience it really feels like the gap between Rita's waking and Darol's onslaught is, like, about forty-five minutes, but later on we'll be filling this gap with whatever duration the plot requires, hours and hours if need be.) To no small extent, it's resistant to the automatic comedy of the looper, since its strain of immortality effectively makes death a gag, and while it's not grim you would probably not accuse it of exploiting the video game logic for too many jokes; as a prime example of why both the qualities of wacky hi-jinx and the nihilistic comedy matter to the time loop movie, there's not even the approximate equivalent here to Tom Cruise trying, and failing, to roll his way under a moving truck while nobody's looking.
As for our heroine herself, her anomie means she's not a lot of character to hang onto, given an oblique intimation of backstory in the first expository minutes of the movie that it returns to later—it does the same thing with Keiji, though his is a bit more concretely-expressed (and does invoke one of those stylistic breaks I said I was after)—and the movie clearly thinks this constitutes an arc, and it's a little irritating, but better than the alternative, that it isn't entirely wrong, using the bloody-hearted openness that is such an abiding feature of Japanese animation to more-or-less sell it as an emotional journey after all, even if Rita isn't that much fun to hang out with. This is shifted only slightly by the advent of Keiji, who, for one thing, comes so many cycles in that it really ought to piss Rita off more than it does—it's like their 90th replay before she finds him—but, you know, in the same way I'm comparing it unfavorably to Edge of Tomorrow (and I'm doing it in my mind perhaps more than you already realize), I'm happy to recognize its achievement when it does something that movie didn't and perhaps couldn't, and when instead of pissing her off for not coming forward sooner, upon realizing that there is another person after all in this world that has become an endless and horrific dream, Rita just breaks down weeping.
And that's strong stuff, so it's unfortunate it does come after her getting pissed at him anyway, but not for hanging out in the backdrop (not literally, at least I don't think so; I'm pretty sure Keiji is literally not in frame until his featured introduction, which is sort of its own demerit and especially if we're still putting this in contention with Edge of Tomorrow, which had a special genius about how to carefully introduce and re-introduce its Rita Vrataski). Instead, it's for spying on her with a drone, which leads to an annoying dialogue about presumed sexual voyeurism that snowballs into the most brainless "anime screenwriting" imaginable as it becomes something of a running "joke," and the fact is Keiji, who is certainly not reinventing any wheels himself, acutely sucks, and, on average, the movie spends its third quarter worse off for his presence, even though by this point he's obviously the only way the plot is ever going to move even slightly forwards. Then when it does, it even manages to address (at least after a fashion) what I've tended to call a "weakness," but which one might prefer to instead call a "requisite suspension of disbelief," inherent to the whole Kill premise—"aha! we've been invaded by a science fictional it from beyond space that our scientists tell us has many inexplicable properties, but if anybody says 'time loop,' then they're obviously insane and we shouldn't take them seriously for even one nanosecond"—though it addresses this so late in the day it winds up making you wonder why in these dozens of iterations it never occurred to Rita to try this a little harder, without Keiji's help, and all told it's a special case of a movie that takes forever to introduce its deuteragonistic dynamic and still doesn't quite manage to figure the dynamic out till twenty minutes before it's over. Eventually, it wends its way towards a more faithfulish reproduction of the novel's finale, albeit with the exact same impulse towards softening it that the American film had—and despite its apparent need to get there by way of some very poorly-communicated sci-fi gobbyldegook, not that I suppose we're obliged to respect that apparent need, I'm happy to admit the form that the denouement takes feels better here than it did there, if for no other reason than this one isn't blatantly fucking cheating.
It's not, then, any all-timer, and, remarkable as such a thing may be, it's substantially overshadowed by the Americanized blockbuster version (though if it helps, and I think it does, in this case it's this one that's "the remake"). But it's not therefore bad, nor even substandard, at least if we don't keep holding the standard up for comparison, and it's doing sufficiently different things that I don't think we constantly need to. That 82 minutes isn't used altogether perfectly, but it does have the effect of making it one of the densest films I've seen lately, narratively, and that's an unusual and therefore rather appealing quality these days. What it's good at, it is pretty good at, and what it's bad at does get (mostly) ironed out before it ends.
Score: 6/10
*Give or take a Science Saru.
**Don't think I didn't notice the aperture that looks like an infinity sign on their stigmas. I did. It's fine.
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