The only manga I’ve ever read was an adaptation of the 2004 sci-fi novel All You Need Is Kill, and that’s because it was a gift. A family member who lives his life much deeper in the anime trenches bought it for me as a Christmas present after the novel was also adapted into the 2014 Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow (and famously retitled a second time under its tagline “Live, Die, Repeat” once it hit DVD). When I heard that there’s a new, Japanese adaptation of the same source text, then, my assumption was that someone had set out to illustrate a more faithful version of either the manga or the original semi-illustrated novel, undoing all of Hollywood’s work to center an action hero that Tom Cruise could credibly play instead of the novel’s heroine (sidelined as a supporting role in the live-action version, played by Emily Blunt). That’s not the case at all. The new version of All You Need is Kill doesn’t simply set the comic book illustrations of its source novel in motion; it redesigns them, introduces an overwhelming wealth of color to a world that was once entirely black & white, and once again makes major changes to the two main characters’ personae & dynamics. It’s less of a manga-faithful rebuke of Edge of Tomorrow than it is a fellow attempt at rogue reinterpretation, this time marketed to the cloistered nerds who actually read manga instead of the wider world of people who’ve heard of Tom Cruise.

That’s not to say that the new anime version of All You Need Is Kill is entirely novel in its reinterpretation. Edge of Tomorrow is not the only pre-existing work it evokes. It plays with the oil-slick color palette of Annihilation, echoes the YA mech-suit therapy sessions of Neon Genesis Evangelion, recalls the vintage sketchbook psychedelia of Mind Game, and touches on some parallel thinking with last year’s sci-fi adaptation Mickey 17. What I mean to say is that it pulls from so many varied sources that it eventually becomes its own thing, a stylish genre remix of its own unique flavor — however mild. For every inspired choice it makes (like redesigning its time-looping monster spawn to look like killer houseplants instead of meatballs with teeth), it also defaults to disappointingly basic choices elsewhere. It’s especially disappointing that the film ages down its two leads from near-future adult supersoldiers to near-future awkward teens. I don’t personally watch too much anime, but most of what I do see ends up being about shy teens who don’t know how to express their feelings to each other, which I suppose is a case of modern movie studios knowing their audience. There’s something absurd about shoehorning that shy-teen dynamic into this story about mech-suited futuresoldiers hunting alien beasts, but that choice does at least give it a different perspective than Tom Cruise’s action-hero-in-training role in the Hollywood version.

If I’m avoiding my plot recap duties here, it’s because talking about time-loop movies feels like its own kind of endless loop at this point. All You Need Is Kill‘s addition to the time-loop canon is that it’s set during a future space alien invasion, where the loop is started by infection with monster blood. The two infected soldiers stuck in this endless loop wake up every time they’re killed by the alien beasts, as if they discovered a video game cheat code for unlimited lives. In this version of the story, one of the characters even finds himself waking up to a video game prompt asking him if he wishes to continue playing, presumably having fallen asleep with a controller in hand. So, what you have is a militaristic sci-fi premise borrowed from an older text like Starship Troopers or The Forever War and made bizarrely existential through the recursive plot structure of Groundhog Day. If you regularly watch movies, you’ve seen more than a few variations of this story in recent titles like Palm Springs, Happy Death Day, Timecrimes, Triangle, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow (duh), and so on. So, all that’ll be new to you here is the visual splendor of its psychedelic animation style, which is very much worth the price of admission. And if you haven’t seen any of those movies before, I’m going to assume that you’re a teenager just getting into the medium, in which case the shy, nerdy leads of this version have something to offer you too: a mirror.

-Brandon Ledet