Last month, I finally saw the film Edge of Tomorrow and loved it. I was initially very reluctant to throw my money at Tom Cruise, because…Tom Cruise. And yet I really wanted to see it, because of this lady.
Well done, John Krasinski.
When I heard that this fantastic film was based on a book, All You Need Is Kill, I was intrigued and promptly put in a request through my library.
In short: Keiji Kiriya is a humble foot soldier fighting a seemingly invincible alien force in Japan. He dies gruesomely on the battlefield, only to discover that he is born again the next day to fight again. In the midst of his fighting, dying, repeating, he meets famed warrior Rita Vrataski, known also as Full Metal Bitch. She recognizes that he, like she, is caught in a time loop, and they train together in order to defeat the alien Mimics.
It’s not often that I like a movie better than its origin novel, but this was the case. For one, the novel was full of gratuitous vulgarity and an overall poor selection of language. Look, an occasional f-word does not bother me at all. Or several, if they’re well-placed. But this one was either poorly written or poorly translated. There were syntactical choices that seemed kind of odd.
For another, the Rita Vrataski of the novel is way more emotional and hyperfeminine than the one in the film. The one in the novel is brittle, young, and highly fragile. I get that it happens and there are people like that, but I just want to see a woman be something other than emotional. Which is why Blunt’s performance was awesome and also somewhat refreshing.
Is that a woman who is going to cry over her coffee? No. Not even a little.
The end was also somewhat of a letdown. I won’t give it away, but it made me scratch my head in disappointment.
The book was okay, but I think it could have been better. Maybe part of the problem was that I’d seen the movie first and liked it so much, that the book didn’t have much of a chance.