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The aliens didn't throw the fight at Verdun just to lure humanity into a trap.
The Omega was aware that Rita had hijacked and was abusing the time loop power, so it knew it needed to exsanguinate her to get it back (as it tried to do to Cage at the dam in the movie). However, despite its best efforts, she always died before bleeding out. So when one lucky loop came up where Rita was badly but not fatally injured, the Omega forfeited the battle in order to let her receive post-victory medical treatment, which included the blood transfusion that robbed her of the power. For the Omega the loss at Verdun was only a minor setback, the recovery of the power was more important, and it was even able to turn it to its advantage by using the false hope to lure humanity into a trap.

Cage was already physically fit before starting.
He jogged and ran, and so the fact that he wouldn't improve during PT on each loop was a non-issue.

Cage's idea of many of the Mimics floating around on asteroids isn't wholly accurate.
Their ship drive uses an alpha. Each time there's a ship problem it can be repaired ahead of time. They can even try out multiple worlds, finding a good one through trial and error.

Cage will not go out of his way to get a blood transfusion after the end of the movie.
He'll keep the alpha blood, in hopes that if he dies in an accident during the rest of his life he'll wake up on the helicopter again. When he's had enough of life, he's a blood transfusion away from never looping again.

A blood transfusion can only remove an Alpha's time-looping power, not an Omega's.
See this Overthinking It.com article.

Rita, Cage and J-Squad killed an Alpha on their assault at the Louvre.
Griff said that the Mimics "know we're coming". Originally, they landed without incident, proceeded into the museum, and were attacked by an Alpha. Despite a previous warning, one of J-Squad took out the Alpha, resetting the day and giving the Mimics advance knowledge of the assault. We only see the next iteration (because, from the prospective of the characters, it is the only iteration). Downing the dropship rather than letting it land safely resulted in everyone but Rita and Cage dying before the Alpha was ever encountered. As both of them knew not to take out the Alpha under any circumstances, no further resets occurred to allow further adaptation by the Omega.

  • It's an interesting WMG, but considering how almost every shot the Mimics fire on the many many Normandy beach landings hits a target I personally feels that the assault on the Louvre by J-Squad is the first and only time it occurs. The Mimics just had their equivalent of AA guns surrounding what was their only real weakness. This is why it took them so long to attack the downed dropship - if they had known it was coming they could have blown it out of the sky long before it reached Paris. The Mimics are just so inherently lethal even without using the time control ability that the assault on the Louvre was effectively a suicide mission with little chance of success.
  • Also remember how Cage said that he had never attacked the Louvre before when discussing it with J squad.
    • Cage only remembers the loops that end with him dying. He doesn't remember the loops that end with an Alpha dying.
  • This might be canon, considering Cage's statement when they get attacked over Paris: "they knew we were coming!"
    • More likely it just makes sense that the Omega was expecting them after it felt Cage discover its hiding place using the link device? After all, the human who has been plotting against it all this time has just found it- what would it be expecting them to do if not attack immediately?

Cage repeated the event that got him his time-reset powers before the attack on the Louvre, recovered them and just didn't tell anyone - including the audience.
Think about it. He knows the exact specifics of the event that gave him the powers of an Alpha since he's lived through Operation Downfall at the very least least hundreds of times. Before going into an all-out attack on a place he's *never* been before, he repeats the events of the very first iteration as closely as he can to recover the time-reset powers, which explains how the incredibly improbable victory at the Louvre actually manages to happen. He just found that telling his comrades that they only have one shot at doing this makes them perform much better - and that duplicity extends to our point of view as well.

Rita removed armor plating from her original exosuit
Perhaps before Verdun, prototype exosuits were designed more like the Jackets in All You Need is Kill - fully-encasing body armor. However, Rita learns during her loops that the additional armor only slows her down. She performs a Battle Strip of her Power Armor, turning it into a powered skeleton. When you can predict your enemy's movements, speed is more of an advantage than armor. After her victory in Verdun, the engineers at UDF figure that her custom suit has significant advantages, and roll out new ones based upon it.

Rita never lost her power
Rita only believes that she lost the power to reset when she got a blood transfusion, but there's little evidence to support this. In reality, she could be still connected - but when she dies, she wakes up in another reality separate from Cage.

The Omega also had a time-resetting power, which would have activated if it had been killed in any other way.
Okay, so the Alphas reset the day if they die. What, then, happened at the very end to reset the Major to his chopper flight? I'm thinking the Omega also has a similar power, only even greater - the power to reset time to whenever things started going wrong when it dies. A power the Major stole and used for himself right before the Omega could. And therefore, he went back to when things first started going wrong for him.
  • Or, alternatively, it sent it back to before things started going wrong for the Omega, namely before the Major got sucked into the war. Perhaps both the Omega and the Major's deaths were responsible for this reset however it does leave open the possibility that the Omega left Earth in order to get re-enforcements to deal with an enemy that can steal it's time reset power.
    • Or it buggered off to go fight/raid something/someone that can't steal its time-manipulation power. Good for humanity, bad for the rest of the galaxy.

The Invasion Day had already looped many times before Cage hijacked the Alpha's Power
In the very first iteration, the invasion is a near success, or at least goes very well. An Alpha is killed and the Omega proceed to keep resetting once something goes wrong. Eventually, it figures out when and where the invasion is going to happen and how much the human forces are going to act. Thus, the reason the invasion is going so horribly when they arrive, is because the Omega has already been adapting. It's just that during one of it's later loops, by sheer luck, Cage manages to get soaked in an Alpha's blood and hijack the loop power.

General Brigham is a plant
Rita and Cage went through literally hundreds of loops trying to proof to General Brigham that they were telling the truth. The level of stubbornness on part of the general to require such a specific series of events and words to even entertain their claim, despite the fact that they're constantly proving to have extensive knowledge of future events, is ludicrous. However, note how minor his reaction to Rita and Cage appearing is. He states surprise, but doesn't show it in any way. For that matter, why would the very important device that the general officially thinks is the result of derangement even be in his safe? The reason: He's keeping it safe for the mimics, because he's on their side. We don't know their actual motives, but it needn't necessarily include the death of all humans. We've also seen that the general is not that moral a person.

All along, he's been helping the aliens. He fired dr. Carter when it became apparent he'd figured out too much of the aliens, and even a potential weakness. He fired him on the spot, and put his device (which he officially dismissed as useless) in a safe only he could access. He'd been warned about Rita and Cage by his mimic overlords, and had put guards on the ready to take them out on the way back. Their orders were to capture the two alive, and give Cage a blood transfusion (given how little he was bleeding, the actual injury he'd sustained would probably not merit a blood transfusion.)

So what actually changed his mind in this loop? It wasn't Cage's speech to him. Rather, it was because Rita off-handedly mentioned that they usually end up killing the general if he doesn't cooperate. If he'd gone along with the alien plan, it would have ended without the day looping, meaning he'd be permanently killed. If he gave Rita and Cage the device, he'd survive, but they'd still be captured, and the rest of the plan would go off without a hitch. That's also the reason the Omega knows that Rita and Cage are coming: The general told them that Cage had used the device.

Note also that the mimics are fighting almost flawlessly in the battle of Normandy, and everyone around Cage is receiving targeted attacks aimed to eliminate them, Cage somehow stays untouched and even the alpha doesn't notice him until it's too late, as if he's not yet been accounted for. The reason: Because the General is in contact with the Omega, and the Omega's actions are variable throughout the loops, so are the General's. The General knows about the fact the aliens will slaughter everyone involved in the offensive, so that's why there's iterations of the day where he pulls the trick with Cage (if he didn't know Cage would certainly die at Normandy, that move would have been career suicide). Cage doesn't usually end up fighting on the beaches of Normandy. It's just bad luck for the mimics that one of the few times he did, he got sprayed by Alpha blood.

  • Perhaps the reason General Brigham is on their side is that in the past he also encountered an Omega, destroyed it, and was infected by the creature's consciousness, now working with the General's human memories and inteligence. That would mean... that Cage in the end is another human infected with Omega working for possible forthcoming aliens.

The Mimics want the humans to make more of them
Okay, there are three things about the aliens in the movie that are never explained: One: Why are they here? Two: Why do they want to provoke a victory in such a specific manner? Three: If they've got the numbers and the mobility, why has this war slogged down so much? For a species capable of repeating time over and over again until they do their conquest perfectly, their advance through Europe has actually been pretty slow. Especially since they've shown that they're perfectly capable of reaching london without detection, yet never do so until during Operation Falldown.

The answer to all of these questions: It was never about killing humans. It was about giving such a resounding show of supremacy that the humans wouldn't dare refuse their demands. The mimics are clearly some kind of mechanical creature. If they're artificial (probably the most likely, given how difficult it'd be for an immobile Omega to eat all the materials necessary to breed such creatures), a reasonable limitation by their creators design would be preventing the mimics from making more of themselves. That's why they want the humans. They've discovered that the humans have very similar mental structures compared to the mimics' creators (which is the reason why the alpha/omega blood works for humans), and wanted to use them to get around these restrictions. The humans would probably refuse (in fact, given the time reset, it's entirely possible the mimics tried the friendly approach first), which is why the mimics are trying to provoke a show of force to establish their absolute superiority.

The reset power can be transferred without the Mimic needing to be alive, as long as the poor bastard on the receiving end is still going.
So the Omega got blown up under the Louvre, Cage got soaked in its blood just before he carked it, and so he returns to the next possible reset point - in the helicopter over London, since the timeline in which Cage gets put on the front is destroyed with the Mimics' and Alphas' deaths. With the main force of the Mimics neutralised, there is no need for Cage to film at the front, which means Cage is never unconscious at Heathrow, removing that reset point.

The difference between the Alpha and the Omega reset powers is that the Omega reset power can be passed on by blood transfusion
.With Cage having Omega blood on board at the close of this movie, and with a sequel in the works, we could potentially see Alphas being made via Cage transfusing his blood to other compatible people. This would set up the possibility of a similar ending to the original novel occuring; that is, if Rita has the same blood type and becomes one of Cage's Alphas, she won't be able to die without killing Cage.

Rita knew that Cage could have the time reseting power those times he visits her and turns around
She stares at him with comprehention. As she lived that time loop situation, she must have had those moments of "loosing hope" too and when Cage turns around, she lives him alone to have some time for himself.

The alien creatures are geological life forms.
Somehow, in another point of the galaxy, evolution made rock creatures with somekind of "lava" blood. They must act like viruses deteriorating the planets while multiplying their soldiers and spreading pieces throughout the universe when the planet collapses. In the movie, one of them hits the Earth and now our planet is doomed.

Omegas are not intelligent life forms.
The Omegas are just tools. They connect the various Mimics and provide time manipulation to the Alphas. But the Alphas are the ones who are in charge. They constructed the Omegas to be able to do these things.

This explains why Omegas provide time resurrection to others, but not to themselves.

The Omega dies because it's smarter than humans.
Or at least because it has a better and more detailed memory. Human memory is very inaccurate, with a lot of interpolation, filling in details etcetera. Cage remembers details from each loop, but the last seven seconds or so is a blur that never made the jump from short-term to long-term memory.

If you are resetting an invasion on loop, that is insufficient- you want to bury mimics right where a squad is going for cover. So it has a much more accurate memory, exactly where every mimic was when the alpha was killed, where each dead mimic was killed before that, all the details.

When a memory that detailed experienced death and was written back to the reset point 48 hours earlier it immediately overwrote the earlier brain with all the garbage data from it's moment of death and crashed itself.

The time loop technology was discovered while they were observing the humans before finally attacking.
They watched the events of Groundhog Day (or any other time loop film/work you want to connect to this universe), tamed it and got it to work for them. That's why it transfers so easily to humans - it's an Earth thing in the first place.

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