I read the manga adaptation rather than the light novel, but it has the same twist ending you described. While I have mixed feelings about the movie ending, I share your opinion on the ending to the novel — it was unnecessarily cruel, and didn't really make any sense.
Overall, the main reason I enjoyed All You Need is Kill was simply that it was illustrated by Takeshi Obata. For me, this alone was enough to make it enjoyable, but it did little to fix the problems in how the story was written.
One does not shake the box containing the sticky notes of doom!
Yeah I was reading a plot synopsis and I noticed that it kinda just stopped, there\'s no ending. AYNISK feels like a short story someone made for a class instead of a work with 2 whole volumes. Plus killing Rita is just unnecessary, she deserves to have her suffering mean something.
Find the Light in the DarkLeave a Comment:
The movie was better.
I saw Edge of Tomorrow and thought it was awesome. Really awesome. So when I found a copy of All You Need Is Kill at Galaxy Bookshop, I picked it up. I expected it to be a lot more involved and to have a lot of detail and action that was left out of the movie thanks to Adaptation Distillation and was looking forward to reading the more complete story.
Instead I was disappointed, as what I got was the opposite. All You Need Is Kill feels like less than half a story. The movie honestly has very little in common with it beyond the basic premise and a few names and benefitted from a HUGE amount of Adaptation Expansion and Character Development including, most significantly, a proper ending to replace the one that made the book virtually a Shaggy Dog Story. The book characters are mostly pretty flat- Keiji is a much duller character than Anti-Hero William Cage, who rapidly becomes very blase about his "Groundhog Day" Loop and his relationship with Rita is cut to a bare minimum before the Diabolus ex Machina plot twist forces him to kill her for no sensible reason, which robs the entire twist of its gravitas. The book was also completely bereft of humour and the scale of the conflict (a scuffle over a single human base) just didn't carry any weight. Also, as mentioned in the spoiler above, I think the last plot twist was completely unforeshadowed and totally nonsensical and I'm EXTRA glad they dropped it from the movie.
Ultimately, All You Need Is Kill was an interesting story, but the format of Japanese Light Novels is just too thin to pull off such a high-concept story satisfyingly and when you compare it with Edge of Tomorrow, which executes it well, it just comes off looking very half-baked. Read it if you want, but don't consider it an essential companion to the vastly more enjoyable movie.