- The reason the Mimics knew about the Normandy invasion was because it was an awesome success on its first iteration. Enough so that someone was even able to kill an Alpha in the process, though without getting splattered with its blood. There were probably many loops of the battle before Cage got sucked into the plot.
- Number of Alphas:
- Carter estimates that there's one Alpha for every 6.18 million Mimics. From what we and Cage see they appear to be more numerous than that - but if you look at it from the perspective of the humans, Carter's only ever seeing the timelines where Alphas didn't die and the Mimics' battles went perfectly, so it stands to reason that the humans think they're much rarer than they really are.
- A counter-possibility, but still definitely Fridge Logic, is that the Omega - aware of Cage's having gained the ability to time-loop, is throwing more Alphas in his way in order to keep him from making significant progress in any one day. Whether Cage kills the Alpha or the Alpha kills Cage, the day resets, undoing all his forward progress. The Omega is stalling for time to come up with a plan to actually deal with the Cage problem.
- Why don't they just nuke the Mimics? The answer is that they probably have, but every time they do, the Omega resets the day and evacuates all of its Mimics from the targeted area, then redeploys them after the nukes have hit. To the humans, it would look like the nukes are completely ineffectual and only conventional attacks would work on them - something reinforced by the victory at Verdun.
- It’s possible that Cage could’ve brought others into the loop (depending on the loop’s inner workings about which we don’t have enough experimental data). To get the power to ride the resets one had to get “covered” in blood of an Alpha or Omega. The successful escape from the dam trap also left Cage with the knowledge of a single Alpha’s location — the dam itself. All he had to do afterwards was convince Rita to tag along with him to there without engaging in the fights once they left the beach (since he’d eventually grown capable of reaching the destination alone, he should’ve been able to get her there too) and kill the Alpha in a manner that would get her covered in its blood. The trap sprung for Cage was not an issue because its main danger to him was the effect of surprise. Once he knew it was there, he could’ve devised some sort of a suicide device to eliminate potential risks.
- The Omega hides under the Louvre because, thanks to its cultural history and any remaining artwork, it'd be one of the few places in an uninhabited Paris—heck, in Europe period—that humanity would avoid bombing. It would have been extremely hard for Rita or Cage to talk any of the brass into such an act]].
- There are some apparent contradictions in the plot, concerning Dr. Carter. It isn't logical that Carter would be removed because he had strange ideas about the Mimics, considering what they were fighting. But consider what General Brigham does with Cage: He essentially strongarms a man with minimal combat experience into fighting on the front lines just to sell his invasion plan and make himself look good, and when Cage tries to get out of it by essentially threatening him with bad press, Brigham responds with having him arrested and thrown into a penal unit with falsified documents accusing him of crimes he didn't commit and falsely demoting him - a severe crime and abuse of power. Similarly, Dr. Carter appears to have been demoted and his technology stolen, almost certainly because of another conflict of interest with Brigham, and Brigham kept the technology for himself, apparently so he could use it to further his own goals.
- Cage telling Rita to not shoot Brigham "this time" makes a lot more sense when you go back and remember that, in one of Rita's own cycles, she told the general what she could do... and he promptly had her arrested and dissected to figure out how it worked. No wonder she's twitchy around him.
- For all the speculation about the Mimics' motivations, there's only one bit of dialogue that hints at any sensible motive has any credibility, yet its barely glossed over: the Mimics are deliberately giving humans hope of victory. When you combine this with their Save Scumming abilities, it should be obvious why they are attacking: they aren't out to get land or resources, they seek out experience in order to become better and better at survival. They want to fight humanity over and over again just like Cage has to fight them repeatedly, so they can learn everything that humanity has to teach them about warfare. No wonder they are called Mimics; they are aiming to achieve perfection through imitating other life forms and surpassing them at their own game. Supported by one of the early news report in the film, where it's mentioned that the Mimics got their name from "mimicking our tactics". Also alluded to by one of Cage's propaganda speeches - "We're going to fight and we're going to win - it's what we do".
- It's possible to guess the twist from the moment we learn about the Omega. How is a giant gaping maw of a Mimic supposed to get from Verdun, where Rita saw it, to a dam in Germany. Answer: it didn't.
- At the end of the film, Cage has genuinely earned his rank.
- Brigham's disbelief of Cage, despite the latter convincing argument. Doesn't make sense until you remember that the last time Cage was in his office, he threatened to blackmail Brigham to spin an entire story on how everything going bad with the war was all on Brigham. To Brigham, Cage could just be telling him another lie. So why does he open the safe? Because in this time-loop Cage makes the comment about Rita shooting him in a past time-loop. Whether Bingham believes what he's told or not, it makes sense to let them think he does, then have them arrested on leaving the building, avoiding a potential firefight in his office where he or his staff could be harmed.
- When Cage loses his ability and is captured, Rita runs in shortly and mocks him "I was out of these in three minutes flat." How would she do it so fast? Because in her loops she had no allies to help her, and frequently wound up alone in mental hospitals where she would have had to escape gurney straps over and over.
- Why is Rita always seen carrying a pistol despite the significant amount of firepower needed to down a Mimic? To allow herself the quick death that might have preserved her power in Verdun.
- Helmets:
- Cage and Rita don't wear helmets much, with Cage calling them a distraction. There's actually another good reason for it: if Cage doesn't wear a helmet, it is much easier for a blow that would wound and maim him on the battlefield to kill him and reset the cycle. It also makes it a lot easier for Rita to shoot him in the head if he gets injured. Rita, on the other hand, isn't wearing a helmet because she's fixing to kill an Alpha, get doused in its blood and regain the power to reset the day.
- In addition to that, Cage doesn't need to wear a helmet because, for the most part, he already knows what's going to happen. There's no point in wearing one if he can anticipate every attack. And in the case where he gets injured due to a blow to the head, it would likely kill him which, as said previously, would work to his benefit.
- He also needs to pay attention to what's happening around him. Cage can't learn from experience if he didn't see what direction the Mimic/projectile/crashing aircraft that killed him came from, so he can avoid it next time.
- What are the odds that Rita and Cage stumbled upon the one house with a working helicopter in the back? Answer: very slim. Which makes perfect sense: Cage has probably searched through every single one of the nearby locations in dozens of other timelines. The helicopter only seems conveniently placed because we didn't see every other house that they visited. Cage himself reveals that they've tried to use that helicopter multiple times. There are clear hints of this even before the reveal: He knows the fuel tank is full. He doesn't want to fly, saying he's afraid of crashing, in spite of his "immortality". He knows exactly how much sugar Rita takes in her coffee. He even knows exactly where a shirt that will fit her is, without even looking. At this point, Rita realizes he knows exactly where the helicopter keys are, but he's stalling for time.
- So, since the power armor everyone wears has plenty of guns and those seem to work well on the mimics, why does Rita wield a sword/VTOL rotor blade in battle? Two reasons. One: You can run out of ammo fairly quickly in a large fight, something painfully shown again and again. And Two: She hopes to slay an Alpha with it so she can come into contact with its blood again.
- Though Cage and Rita are initially distraught over Cage receiving a blood transfusion, thereby cutting off his ties to the Omega along with his ability to reset the day, this might actually have saved his life. After all, Cage ends up blowing the Omega to smithereens, and we immediately see all Mimics die due to their links to the Omega: a fate Cage might have shared if he were still tied to it.
- Rita probably tried having sex with Hendricks to save him, and nothing happened. That's how she knows sex wouldn't work. It also stands to reason that she tried transfusing her blood to him, and that didn't take either. Ouch.
- Cage asks Rita how many times she had sex to establish this and Rita slams a training robot into his face. While it's played for laughs at the time, we later find that Rita tried to save Hendricks over 300 times, presumably including the sex method, so her reaction is understandable.
- After realising that no matter what he does in every loop he can't save Rita, Cage has a Heroic BSoD in which he basically shuts down, ignores everyone dying horribly around him and just plunges on by himself without even bothering to save any of his friends. In this timeline, he comes the closest to completing (what he thinks is) the loop and nearly loses his looping abilities. Given how cold, distant and remote Rita is, she likely went through the exact same cycle and in, in her last loop, completely shut down and pressed on to complete the mission before losing her looping powers, ignoring everyone dying horribly around her (including the man she'd fallen in love with) in the process. Doubles as Fridge Horror.
- A farmhouse is a peaceful source of sanctuary, a place that one might expect to retire to after soldiering. So of course once Cage realises he must pay any price to achieve victory, he burns it to the ground in the next loop.
- The Mimic-held areas seem to be almost completely devoid of animal life, but otherwise unaffected. This would imply that the Mimics are here for meat, and given their ridiculous offensive ability they would eventually devour every animal on Earth.
- Mimics appear to be adapted specifically to fight world wars and supplant a given planet's dominant species. Barring a very unusual evolutionary path, this might mean that someone created them.
- Adding on this fact, the Mimics appear to be the perfect invasion force: adaptable, naturally strong, and due to their time manipulation abilities, completely unbeatable. That sure sounds like the mark of a race that was genetically engineered, doesn't it?
- The Mimics arrived on Earth via asteroid, and Dr. Carter hypothesizes that they spread through the universe like a virus. This means that they have to make asteroids in order to spread.
- The ending. Cage received the time loop abilities from the blood of the killed Omega, which allowed him to reset the time again for a happy ending where all the Mimics died out without the Omega and everyone he knew during his previous time looping attempts are alive and well. It is neither explicitly mentioned nor hinted as to whether this time loop is the one last time Cage can reset. If not, he's stuck with this ability for a Fate Worse than Death unless he goes for the painful options of having substantial blood loss via transfusion or other means...
On the headscratchers page.
