Headscratchers / Edge of Tomorrow

New entries on the bottom.

The Exosuits

• What, exactly, is the advantage of the exosuits or "jackets?" They're bulky, and beyond the More Dakka aspect, seem more dangerous than anything. Everyone seen in them, beyond Rita and eventually Cage, moves incredibly slow. They seem more detrimental than useful.
  • Because they give the user super-strength and a much greater amount of firepower against an enemy which is matter-of-fact faster and stronger than any living human.
  • The Jackets only look slow. They only really walk in that slow, awkward gait when the army is slogging through the sand in a battle where there is mass confusion. Rita shows that they are really quite agile and powerful; you can punch cars, leap a dozen meters, etc. Plus they appear to negate recoil, which is absolutely essential when you need to put twenty or so bullets into a Mimic without the weapon flying in every direction when you hold down the trigger.
  • And apart from Rita (and eventually Cage), we only ever see grunts "with limited training". Given more than a few days in one of those things, Rita and Cage show that you can be pretty badass. This is kind of like "what good is a car if you keep accidentally turning the wipers on and running into mailboxes?"
  • Rita and her squad appear to walk slow and clunky when first introduced. However, from the way they walk it appears as though the suits are much better when running. They are likely meant to allow soldiers to get to a position fast, do maximum damage from that position, and move to another location. And given how fast the mimics move, the suit's running ability, enhanced strength, and firepower likely make-up for the ability to walk swiftly.
  • There seems to be the matter of battery power, where they can leap and sprint in brief bursts that will likely drain the suit of power quickly thus necessitating a low-power slow mode in order to retain enough power for the battle.
  • Consider that any real deficiencies of the Jackets would be overlooked when the manufacturer's PR department can cite Rita as an example of how the product can allow a soldier with minimal training to score hundreds of confirmed kills in a single battle.
  • The suit allows to carry two light cannons, a grenade launcher and four (or three, if the launcher takes "slot") assault rifles, with ammo to all of them and without any encumbrance coming from that, as the suit "carries itself". It also enhance soldier's strength to the point that pushing a tonne is as hard as pushing few kilos. The powersource is also quite reliable, allowing to go for few hours. Which is all well enough to overcome any disadvantages coming from such suit and we are talking about it's potential by barely trained New Meat. When the same suit is worn by well-trained soldiers like Rita and Cage, they effortlessly dominate the battlefield, and it's all about their combat experience, not ability to foresee the location of enemy (just recall how easily Cage was dying before he actually learn to fight, regardless of looping). And remember that modern combat armour and protective gear is restricting by itself - you move very stiffly in it. And while it provides you with protection, it weighs quite a lot, not to mention rest of your gear.
  • The props weighed about 80 pounds if I is not mistaken, and that was just the "light" version for filming. In universe, the amplified strength shown off in the car chase scene where a guard stops it cold pretty much justifies it, given that soldiers who are experienced can also punch Mimics to death. There are also two versions. One that's fairly open that allows for decent range of movement, and then Kimmel's version, which you see in the background at times, which has more armor coverage and presumably firepower.
  • The armor, or lack thereof. Except for the 'heavy' variant, which Kimmel wears, there isn't actually any armor plating on the exosuits, save for minimal protection of the legs. There's nothing, however, on the top of the suit - no pauldrons, torso or back plate, and no arm plates. Since one of the main advantages of the exosuit is it's increased strength, why on earth would they not put armor plates on it? The exosuit should be able to bear the weight easily, it would decrease deaths by minor shrapnel and explosions, and render the troops much harder to actually kill. I can understand why Rita and Cage don't wear helmets, as it makes it more easy to kill themselves, but what about actual armor plating for the rest of the troops?
  • A few reasons come to mind. (1) Expense. Fielding troops with power armor is going to be costly, especially if you're building other support units that could use the same armor (e.g. Quadcopters). (2) Even if that wasn't a problem, it might take extra time to build millions of jackets. (3) There's an implication in the intro of the movie that the Jacket technology was relatively new - note that one of the news reports reads "Details of new Exosuit technology revealed" after the victory in Verdun. Presumably they fielded a few into battle and, impressed by Rita's success, moved ahead with mass-producing them. Lastly, (4) Armor adds weight and might slow the jackets down, wear down the joints, or drain their batteries more quickly.
  • 5) Fitting. These suits are being worn by men and women, tall people and short people, fat ones and skinny ones. They also appear to be mass-produced, not customized to individuals. Armor plating could limit how easily the exosuits can adjust their various sections' configuration to fit the person they're encasing.

The Alpha's behavior

• Why did the Alpha wander near where the troops are deployed at the beginning, and close enough for Cage to kill out of sheer luck. If it acts as a switch to reset time, wouldn't it be more appropriate to stay very far back and only come out when the Mimics force is losing and needs a reset?
  • The Mimics want a perfect victory here, and don't care if they reset even reasonably good timelines. With Alphas on the front line, the Mimics would be able to win a victory without any casualties whatsoever by resetting every time the humans have any sort of success.
  • That theory raises the question of why would a hive mind care if it lost a bunch of troops, as they seem to have an unlimited reserve?
  • the mimics are part of the whole, so it's like cutting off arms of a person, eventually an alpha will get killed when enough limbs are lost and it can reset so it doesn't lose those arms.
  • Unless the mimics are violating conservation of energy/matter, they don't have an unlimited number of reserves.
  • It also raises the question, why send the Alpha to the frontline at all, expecting the enemy to kill it, instead of keeping it tucked safely by your side and killing it personally whenever you feel like resetting time. ESPECIALLY since, as you already know, its vital powers can be transferred to your enemies.
  • the proposed that humanity's only saving grace is that it CAN absorb the powers of the alpha, and because of the next line below this one, holding them back was not possible.
  • Rita explains that the Alphas are the smart ones. They're akin to the Synapse Creatures of the Tyranids. They need to be on the front lines to coordinate troops and collect combat data.

Rita's knowledge of her ability

• In the backstory, how exactly did Rita find out that she lost the ability to return to the past? She would have to die to do that, and since she is still alive...
  • It's explained in the movie proper that people can "feel" the ability going away. When Cage loses the ability due to having a blood transfusion, he said he could feel it going away. The loss is also denoted by the fact that the full black eyes fade away.
  • Or maybe the visions simply stopped after the transfusion and she figured out what happened.
  • Or maybe she had a conversation with Carter after her transfusion and they figured it out or tested her blood or something.

The Aliens

• Why don't the aliens ever kill their Alpha to reset the timeline? Like - the final battle at the end of the movie would have been a good time.
  • That would be kind of like you telling your immune system to fight a virus. It's one big organism. It simply doesn't think that way.
  • Right. Or like telling your immune system NOT to fight a virus on a certain occasion to lure it into a trap. Which the Omega does. Meaning "single organism" IS a simplification, and Omega has direct control over the others or at least can give them orders.
  • It clearly understands the concept as it is shown to try to prevent Cage from killing himself.
  • It's not one big organism, calling it that is just a way of simplifying things. And even then, even animals know that they should chew off their limbs to get out of a trap. Killing the Alpha should not be more difficult than that. And they even reset time, so there's really no reason not to do so.
  • No, they specifically said in the movie that the entire Mimic race is essentially one big organism.
  • Said by whom? Some guy guessing based on what limited information he has. They are at best educated guess, not to be taken for facts.
  • Not to mention that there's nothing nearby that could kill the Alpha in time to prevent them from blowing up the Omega. Maybe the Alpha could kill itself, but it might not have had enough time between the moment it spotted the grenades and when they exploded.
  • But aren't there like hundreds or Thousands of Alphas on the planet? Why not have one of them kill itself or have Drones kill it. Can't the Omega reset the day based on the death of any Alpha?
  • They should have gotten the warning a lot earlier, like when a dropship comes crashing down and the ensuing 20 minutes of (offscreen) fighting. And no Mimic soldiers rushed to the Louvre to guard the Omega (only a single Alpha guards it), instead they waste their time finding and killing the protagonists. Looks like the Omega grabs a Villain Ball and held on to it tightly from then to the movie's end.
  • The aliens are probably all concentrating at the beach and surrounding areas at this point for their final attack. The force J squad encountered during the crash is probably the few defenders that are left.
  • One of the biggest themes is that the Alien's near-omnipotent knowledge is because they use Save Scumming. The entire group was told that if it came down to between killing an Alpha or dying, they should "take one for the team". It's used to showcase that the Omega is actually quite stupid tactically without the knowledge of the future, making amateur mistakes when it can't take advantage of a reset.
  • The movie also implies that the Omega loses its power when it is taken by a human. Otherwise Cage would never have gotten it and died his first, horrific, agonizing death.

What is reset and what isn't

• Can soldier Mimics (the film doesn't specify exactly what the epileptic tentacled ones are called) remember anything after a reset? If I recall correctly, Cage could kill several of them over and over again because he knew where they would appear, but if they remembered being killed like that, you would think they would learn how to dodge.
  • They are called Gammas I believe and it would appear they do not otherwise every time would be different. It is described in the movie that they are the "claws" of the Omega. They are probably entirely instinctual/reactionary in how they operate.
  • At this point Cage is the one in control. The Omega doesn't get to remember the loops anymore; Cage does. It thus always reacts the same. If it were in control, the Gammas would cope with each iteration as an extension of the whole.
  • That doesn't make sense. If the Omega can't remember the loops, then it wouldn't have started searching for him to give him misleading visions of where it was because it wouldn't be aware that anything was different. Additionally, Rita and Dr. Carter say later in the movie that "it knows who you are" - now while I'm willing to concede that pretty much 99% of what the two of them say is blind guesswork, it's the best we have to go on. Additionally, when Cage is at the dam in Germany - remember, a place he could only have gone because he was getting fake visions from the Omega, something it wouldn't have any need to send if it didn't at least suspect that its powers were being hijacked by a human - the Alpha stops him from blowing his brains out instead of immediately trying to kill him like every other Mimic we've seen in the story thus far.
  • Notice that Cage never fights an Alpha after he died the first time, and he didn't have any idea what was going on until after his second or third death. It can be assumed that the Alpha for that battle was held back to protect it and command the Gammas from behind their lines. Like was said above, Cage is the only thing resetting; and he's only peripherally connected to the Omega, so nothing about the difference is relayed back.
  • If the Mimics act the same everytime, why does the Alpha only appear only the first time, when Cage kills it and gets splattered with its blood? It showed up seconds after Cage sees Rita, and never appears in later loops. This makes it pretty clear that the Omega knows about the resets activated by Cage.
  • The Alpha only appeared the first time after a series of events that are never repeated in subsequent timelines. Specifically Cage's squad being wiped out and him lying shocked and seemingly dead. When it does show up, the fighting has ended in the area, and it's moving warily and surrounded by guards. There's no other loop we see where Cage basically plays dead in the crater where his squad died, and the Alpha seems to be avoiding direct combat, so he never runs into it again.
  • The Omega got to reset the first time when Cage killed the Alpha, but after that Cage was always resetting first. Thus The Mimics changed behaviour between after the first loop, but never could again.
  • At the end of the film Cage took the Omegas blood and reset time, but the omega stayed dead after the reset. Going by the same logic, this alpha may have stayed dead as well.

Mimic Weapons?

• What, exactly, are the Mimics weapons? At the beach, we see small missiles flying from unknown sources at the soldiers, but every time a Mimic is actually seen fighting, it just attacks with tentacles, no projectiles.
  • It appears the Gamma Mimics can fire a sort of biological rocket for heavier targets or at range. In one of the pans of the beach you see some under the sand shooting them out.
  • They are basically shooting pieces of their body as anti-aircraft projectiles. Otherwise their twitching tentacles are used for combat.

Resetting Time

• Why did Cage and Rita attempt to make a break for it after they had ascertained the real location of the Omega? It would have been simple enough for Rita to shoot him in the head, or for Cage to do it himself. That way they could just reset the day and started to go after the Omega with more time on their hands, without military suspicion, and with Cage's ability to reset if necessary.
  • They needed time for Cage to use the device and get the location. They presumably decided against having Cage do it in the bathroom and wanted somewhere they wouldn't be interrupted. When it was clear they weren't getting out peacefully, she just had Cage do it in the car. By that point they got caught up in the chase and forgot themselves.
  • They probably just messed up. The correct thing to do would probably have been for Cage to use it in the general's office with Rita holding the general hostage, and the moment Cage get the info, Rita shoots Cage. And who knows, they might have tried it if given the chance. But they obviously decided to get out by car. And once that got under way, there really weren't much time between Cage learning Omega's location and that armored soldier crashing their car.
  • To be fair, it's total Idiot Ball. The plan from the beginning should have ended with getting the location and shooting Cage. How they get to that point should never have mattered; every attempt should have ended with the assumption that Cage gets killed immediately after confirming he had the location.
  • Remember that Cage doesn't like being killed. He has repeatedly tried to weasel out of it, even knowing he's better off dead - like when he was left paralysed for example.
  • The general's office and Whitehall are full of people who could interrupt Cage right in the middle of using the device and taser him, and Cage no longer knows what happens next at that point (they never got to the point of getting the device in earlier loops). Leaving Whitehall seems the safer alternative. Rita probably was ready to shoot Cage as soon as they got the location, but she never got the chance.
  • What we don't know is how many iterations happened between from first time they gained the device and the iteration we see as next with car chase. For all we know this could be their hundredth attempt or second one. And we will never learn that. In case of this being their second or any of early attempts, this could be simply a random mess-up during their trail.
  • I assumed this was the first time they got the device. Because if it wasn't, they would surely know to use it earlier.
    • It is at least the second time. We see them exit the building, get surrounded by soldiers, Rita pulls a gun on Cage, then a cut to the start of the car chase inside the building's parking garage.
  • On the other hand, their plan is flawed with different fallacy. From what we know, in every single iteration Rita is only carrying her standard-issue pistol to shoot Cage. It never occurred to them to subdue the general or kill him in silent way after checking who and when will came into the office, use the device and then kill Cage. Instead their plan is about getting the device and getting out of the area.
  • It may also be that their plan was to get the device back to Carter, the man who invented it in the first place and had the best idea of how it worked. It was only after they initiated the car chase that they realized they would just have to take their chances using it on Cage right then and there. Then, almost immediately after ascertaining the Omega's true location, the Jacketed soldier crashed their car, dazing them both to the point where neither could act to kill Cage for a reset.

Why Doesn't Anyone Recognize Cage?

• We're shown in the opening Cage appearing on TV and speaking on behalf of the UDF several times, and even states his importance as the pressman for this new army. Yet when Cage is arrested, nobody appears to know who he is.
  • He's probably more often behind the cameras than in front of them, acting as a director, producer, consultant, that sort of thing.
  • J Squad don't seem to quite be the type to watch the news much. It is also possible that one (or more) characters looked at him for a moment and figured "Nah, couldn't be him" if they even recognized him. After all, what would a Major from Press Relations be doing as a grunt in a squad of misfits? And finally, it is always possible that the order was written in such a way as to get a reaction of "It's from the General, don't ask questions".
  • Cage is responsible for civilian-facing propaganda. People in the army are apparently too busy fighting to watch the news.
  • Cage seemed like a bit of a blowhard in the beginning of the movie. For that reason, I assumed that either: a.) he overstated his own importance to the war effort, and was maybe only a locally known propagandist or b.) some people actually did recognize him, but those people also resented him coaxing them to join up when he himself had never seen action, so they went with the whole "desertion" thing.
  • If a minor staff officer - not even a general, just an oakleaf - appeared at the local burger joint in a paper hat, would you recognize him? Now keep in mind that he is a behind-the-camera staff officer from the military of another country. Cage is effectively anonymous and Brigham knows it.
  • Cage is fairly prominent. He's not a Colonel or anything, but in the beginning it's seen that a large part of his job is appearing in front of cameras and on major network talk shows.
  • However, it's entirely probable that Cage is just one of many army PR flacks employed to boost recruitment and the public is probably used to ignoring them.
  • That's why "Impersonating an Officer" is on his list of charges. He's charged with impersonating himself. The fact that he looks like that high-ranking officer on television plays right into the narrative of the frame-up.

The Ending

• I'm not sure if I miss anything during the movie. The Omega dies, dousing Cage with its blood, and transfers its "time-resetting" ability to him (Sure) He returns to the past again (Okay) and, somehow, the past-Omega is already dead (What?)
  • Clearly, that's some kind of property of the Omega's blood and the Omega being destroyed. Since the time-traveling that Cage and Rita do are based off Alpha blood, not the Omega's blood, we know what effect that blood has. With the Omega, we don't know precisely how its blood behaves, especially after it has been killed. Its not really a contradiction, its just... odd and unknown.
  • In addition, the visions suggest the Omega is affected by the looping, too. Remember: neither Vrataski nor Cage saw visions on their first loop, but they both saw visions on later loops. For that to happen, the Omega needed to not know to send visions initially, but know to send visions later, which could only happen two ways: either by the Omega figuring out during a single (but not every) loop that it needed to inject the false visions, or by the Omega experiencing some form of time-loop effect itself. If the latter is true, then what happened at the end might have been as simple as the last activation of the Omega bringing its dead future self back in time.
  • Given the known time travel properties of the Mimics, it's not impossible to assume that the Omega exists in a state of temporal flux or something, and doesn't follow a linear timeline like we do. Thus, killing it in the future also kills it in the past when there's a reset, because OUR future is essentially ITS past.
  • An alternate possibility is that the Omega's consciousness 'arrived' back in the past physically healthy, but mentally blank. The reset seems to work by transmitting the information that is future-you into the body of past-you. And the Omega had just had a bandolier full of grenades detonate inside its brain, after all. Even if its dying spasm triggers the reset, the Omega's consciousness is going to be a scrambled mess, while Cage's is perfectly fine. So the Omega 'beams' its already-destroyed mind back into its perfectly healthy body... which then crashes the Mimic network and drops dead again anyway, because it's just basically suffered the equivalent of a catastrophic stroke.
  • So basically if you kill the Omega, you reverse time back a few days and save all your troops who die in that final assault. Which is a ridiculously convenient for the attackers, except (maybe) this is intentionally built-in in by their creators in case these creatures get out of control.
  • This actually has some level of Fridge Brilliance to it. The Omega likely has the same kind of resetting abilities of the Alpha, but sends the Alpha's because saftey reasons considering Mimic's are just one big nervous system. When Cage dropped the Grenades into it, it did exactly what it did for the Alpha's, it tried to learn from it. However, since the Omega controls all of the time abilities, it sent time back to the best possible time for which to counter Cage; the day he arrives in London. Since it just had its brain blown up, it effectively was a Hoist by Their Own Petard and Death by Irony because its own time abilities were used against it.
  • Now that Cage has re-acquired the Omegas ability to reset the day, what does this mean for him in the future? If he dies in an accident, or (eventually) of old age, has he not acquired in effect, a kind of immortality? Or does the omegas destruction prevent him from ever resetting the day again?
  • The ability to reset expires after one day.
  • Or in any case it only appears to allow resets into the immediate past. The result is that he would end up reliving the final days of his life endlessly.
  • It doesn't matter if Cage has re-acquired the reset power. If he doesn't want it, he can simply get himself a blood transfusion and it's gone.
  • Consider also - is the Omega actually dead? We know the reports have the mimics dying and the alien forces withdrawing, but we don't see its mangled remains or any such thing in this time stream. This thing is, by implication, pretty set on self-preservation. It uses time travel to try and ensure perfect victories, despite most of its army being comprised of drones, and it doesn't even like to stomach the loss of one of its Alpha proxies. It seems as likely that it's falling back and abandoning its battle plans to retreat somewhere and regroup, 'playing dead' for the human military, as that it's actually been killed.
  • There's apparently a sequel in the works, so the Omega may well turn out to not be dead. It's possible that it reset time as it died and willingly retreated from battle - knowing it couldn't win. If the enemy inevitably finds where it's hiding in Paris, it probably needs to regroup before it can try again.

Unsafe Training Rooms

• Who thought it was a good idea to have training rooms with multiple open entrances that live rounds can be fired through into a corridor filled with people, and targets that can hit someone with enough force to break bones, even while wearing an exosuit?
  • Because they weren't supposed to be in there in the first place. There's a warning on the floor saying that people aren't supposed to go beyond that line into where the training drones (and Rita) are, and in case that wasn't noticeable, an alarm clearly goes off when Cage goes into the pit. In the same scene, before Cage goes into the pit, you can see the soldiers just standing and shooting at the drones, just like with any other shooting range. Only Rita and Cage actually do their training inside the shooting range; Cage can afford the risk, and Rita is skilled enough such that those things barely pose a threat to her.
  • When someone standing in the middle of the training room, shooting at the mechanical arms coming from all directions, it doesn't matter if others is behind or in front of that line. The room should have only one door, or at least have bulletproof glass at the viewer's side.
  • The training room is in fact a shooting gallery. The entry ports to it are stands for gunners, so they can practice their aim on spasmatically moving targets which are used to emulate Mimics. You should rather ask what Rita, without any protective gear, is doing inside every time Cage arrives there.
  • Cage is enduring lethal training for a reason. Rita wants to pump into him as much experience as possible and since he can afford getting injured, crippled or killed in the process, the whole ordeal is straight from hell. Even if first few hundreds or even thousands of training sessions are about him being lame fighter and lousy shot, they have all the time they need for that. Remember that Cage can't train in normal manner - his body won't retain any muscles or build strength in next loop. Nor that he needs any. It's about training his skills and reflexes and polishing them.
  • long story short: it isn't a training room, it's a shooting range. Rita and Cage are just inside of it because they're that badass.

More Melee Weapons

• Considering how effective Rita's sword was against Mimics, and given that Mimic's seem to prefer melee combat, why aren't more soldiers armed with melee weapons, if not as a primary weapon than at least as a backup weapon for when they run out of ammo or their guns fail?
  • Her "sword" is a rotor blade. The suits are designed for New Meat with limited training. But recruits with martial arts experience should have hammers, swords and all kinds of weapons since they could use them.
  • They might be able to use them, but moving around with jackets is going to take some time adjusting to, and minimal jacket training might not cover that. Plus, Mimic movements are shown to be quick and unpredictable; Rita and Cage are able to engage them at close combat because they've gone through loop-induced training and know how they behave.
  • In the original Japanese novel, Rita's melee weapon (a massive battleaxe) weighs 200kg, and is ridiculously difficult to wield properly. Every single soldier who tried to emulate her ended up breaking his spine on the first try. Rita can only use it because she spent dozens of resets training. The movie's sword is probably nearly as heavy, otherwise it wouldn't have the power to kill armoured Mimics without shattering.
  • Note that Rita fought under Verdun at least three hundred times, which provided her with countless hours of battle experience. Not to mention that her "sword" is still only a secondary weapon.
  • Combat Pragmatism. What is better? Engaging your enemy that can only attack you with melee attacks via fielding superior firepower and denying the enemy ability to retaliate or going also melee against enemy that is vastly superior than your troops in said melee combat? Going for melee attacks against enemy that can't retaliate on distance would be complete waste of any tactical advantage humans have. Nor that is helpful, as Omega is Save Scumming, but fielding melee units would be outright suicidal.
  • Mimics can be killed literally with Five Rounds Rapid, which takes about a day to train. Training melee skills takes few weeks for absolutely basic close quarters combat. And UDF is desperate enough to field penal units into direct combat. So no, going for melee is not an option.
  • The practical advantages of Rita's sword are that it doesn't use any ammo and it gives her a good chance of getting an Alpha's blood on her again, thereby regaining the reset ability, if she encounters one. The main drawback is that it took her around 300 cycles to get to the level of proficiency she has in the movie. Someone who just picked one up and went into combat with a Mimic would probably be killed rather quickly.
  • A melee weapon can also be dropped or easily lost in the chaos of battle - not to mention getting grabbed by one of the tentacles. The guns are built into the armor the troops wear, probably for this reason.
  • Everything assumed about the jacket's performance also falls under Unreliable Narrator or however you want to describe the military getting the wrong impressions because they used Rita as their example.

Grandfather Paradox

• Alright, kind of an old one for any movie that involves changing the past, but if time resets every time Cage is killed, he shouldn't have the Alpha's blood in him any more (logically, because he didn't kill it and rub it's blood in an open wound each time), meaning that he should lose the ability to time travel after the first time. The Alpha has an excuse, it ALWAYS had the ability to reset time, and always has its own blood. Cage has to re-acquire it each time in order to keep 'stealing' the ability without it being retconned out of existence.
  • The ending suggests that the time travel is more than purely mental; I'm guessing that the blood is transported back as well. (Which implies that, at the end, Maj. Cage has some Omega blood in him ... not that it will do any good.)
  • The ending also implied that the Alphas and Omegas exist outside of how we perceive time, as the Omega just dropped dead even though we're reset a good number of days now. Cage getting the blood into him means that he also existed outside of time, at least until he got the blood transfusion.
  • Consider the blood to be the time travelling mechanism (like if it was full of time travelling nanites) and the consciousness of the person to be its passenger. The Alpha's blood seems to take Cage's mind back 24 hours, but both go along for the ride.

What was Dr. Carter's device designed to do?

• Follow me here. Carter designs and builds a device that's supposed to do something. We're never really told what. All we're told is that for the device to function as designed, a live Alpha is needed. Eventually Cage is used as a substitute for the Alpha and the device gives him a true vision of the Omega's location. So... if it had been used on an Alpha, as it was supposed to be, it would have given the Alpha the vision? What's the point of that? How exactly did Carter plan on persuading the Alpha to tell him what it saw?
  • That was probably the point of the little computer screen attached to it, so he could see what the Alpha was seeing.
  • I took it that once they were jacked into the Mimic hivemind they would somehow track the signal back to it's origin. Having a guy that could talk instead handily negated that need.
  • I assumed it was meant to be used with other equipment - hook it up to a computer, stick an Alpha to boost the connection to the Omega, and track the amplified signal back to the Omega using standard movie science. Being able to use it on an Alpha-boosted human meant the other equipment wasn't needed, since the boosted signal itself was able to show him where it was.

Mimic Blood Behavior

• Does anyone find it really weird that the Mimics' time control power is so easy to hijack? If all it takes to steal an Alpha's power is to get splattered in its blood, you'd think the species wouldn't have had any kind of success at all with their invasions. Doesn't seem very evolutionarily sound to me.
  • Unless it's because Humans Are Special and that other races can't hijack the time-reset powers.
  • This one was one the theories proposed in the movie with how Cage managed to do it. It could be that through some strange twist of evolution, human and Mimic biology happens to be compatible.
  • It's also possible that not ALL humans can hijack the power. Cage and Rita may be the only two humans who have the ability.
  • Which nicely would solve another headscratcher: What if Cage would kill the Alpha again and give its blood to any volunteer of J Squad? On what death would a reset happen then? Better if only one person has the power at a time...

Carter's transponder

• When Cage meets Carter for the first time, Rita proposes testing the transponder on Cage, but Carter says it doesn't work. How does he know that? Did he ever test it on an Alpha? He clearly didn't test it on Rita otherwise she would know it wouldn't work.
  • He may have worked out some preliminary diagnostics based upon his research of his theories on Alpha behaviour and used on the prototype locked up in Whitehall. If even those diagnostics could not be performed on the replacement transponder, he could reasonably assume that it wouldn't work in the field.
  • From what he says it sounds like he had to make do with replacement materials, which ended up being inferior. Given that the control console wasn't even attached (he apparently only made a mockup of the plug) it's likely not even complete. The mockup he had might have had a mechanical failing that the working prototype didn't.
  • Dr. carter actually says in the movie that he couldn't make it work "not here, not with these materials", so parent is correct.
  • Why was Dr. Carter's device locked up in the general's safe? If they thought Dr. Carter was crazy, then his prototype should have been either broken down for its parts or collecting dust in the closet in an R&D facility somewhere. The only reason for it to be in the safe was that they took Dr. Carter seriously, in which case he should have still been in R&D, not reassigned as a mechanic.
  • General Brigham tends to demote people who cross him. Maybe Carter mouthed off to him and found himself re-assigned as a mechanic until Brigham was ready to bring him in and deal with him and his prototype again - after the invasion.

Death and the Dam *spoilers*

• What exactly breaks the cycle? Initially, Rita says that she broke her cycle when she was wounded at Verdun and given a transfusion, which suggests that either surviving the day or getting a transfusion is what does it. Rita seems perfectly willing to kill Cage when he has gruesome but survivable injuries that wouldn't require transfusion (like a broken leg!). The cycle appears to be broken when Cage is given a blood transfusion. But retroactively, this makes the dam trap confusing, because if the plan worked Cage was going to bleed out hundreds of miles behind enemy lines with no chance of rescue. So if it's just 'losing the blood' that matters, did that really never happen during the hundreds of on- and off-screen deaths for Cage?
  • It's pretty clear that it involves removing or replacing the alien blood from the Alpha in Cage's system, so the plan of the Mimics for the Dam trap must have been something along the lines of "remove all Alpha blood from Cage before he dies to avoid a reset." Cage drowned himself before he bled out and so still had enough Alpha blood in his system to get the reset. Rita is willing to kill Cage whenever he has an injury that will mean a possible blood transfusion (and losing the reset) or will prevent him from training anymore on that cycle. A broken leg for Cage means he can't train any more that day, so she resets him.

Headcount in the Final Act *spoilers*

• When Cage loses his ability to reset the day, he must convince J-Squad to accompany him and commandeer a quadcopter in order to charge the Louvre where the Omega is hiding. Throughout the film, we see that the J-Squad lineup is Nance (the only woman on the team), Griff (the guy who suits Cage up before the battle), Kimmel (the guy who gets crushed by a falling ship), Ford (the guy who tells Cage to watch his back), Skinner (the guy who taunts Cage by saying he's a dead man), and... the guy who doesn't talk much. Then, when they're on their way to the Louvre, we see Cage pass two anonymous pilots driving the quadcopter, and an Asian soldier manning the turret. Where did they come from? We know these aren't part of the J-Squad we've seen, as this J-Squad is chatting with each other while waiting to drop out of the plane. Were they a part of J-Squad that we didn't see before, and joined up when Rita, Cage, and the rest of J-Squad came around? Did they volunteer from some other squad? Were they comrades of Rita Vrataski?
  • Although who the extra bodies are is not explained, that they were comrades of Rita's is the most likely explanation. Recall, she is part of an elite squad herself, so it's not impossible she could have talked a few of them (off-screen) into joining the mission as well. But if that's the case, then it makes one wonder why she didn't talk her own unit into joining her and Cage instead of J-squad. Not that J-squad were totally inept as soldiers as such, but they were still the dregs of the UDF all the same.
  • A rewatch seems to confirm the 'comrades of Rita' theory, at least for the Asian gunner. A blink and you'll miss it moment in the scene where Cage finds Rita before the battle places him next to a kenyan soldier, the one who proceeds to follow Cage when he sees him approaching Rita (if you miss this in this scene, wait until the end, when Cage revisits this place as an officer; he's next to the soldier who says "Ten-shun!", and spins around to attention when he does so). This theory additionally explains why Rita wasn't with Cage immediately when he was explaining himself; she was doing a little bit of recruiting of her own.

Does Cage ever sleep?

• He's living hundreds of waking days in a row...he must be pretty tuckered at the end!
  • There's a night before each invasion that he probably uses for sleep.
  • He wakes up from sleep at the beginning of every loop, and he never stays awake for more than two days during each loop. So yes, he does sleep every time.
  • Whether he tries to sleep during the every time is another matter. In the first loop, he probably had a hard time sleeping, considering that he was going into a suicide mission, but in subsequent loops it would be a different matter, since he'd know the opportune times to sleep. I imagine his body wouldn't need much resting, but his mind would, considering what he's experienced. I doubt he slept after the battle, during the ploy to find the Omega at the dam, since he would have been hopped up on adrenaline and sleeping at that point would make him vulnerable to dying in a way that made him unable to learn from his death.
  • He has dream-like visions of the Omega in between loops, and he always 'wakes up' to start a new loop. It's possible that he actually does sleep, like, that he loops back to a time when he's unconscious, and then stays unconscious until he's woken, while his mind processes everything that's happened. It only seems like he immediately starts over at the moment of waking, because, well. That's when he's conscious again.
  • Maybe, every once in a while after he is too tired mentally, he flees the UDF (like he did in the loop when he went to get drunk in a bar) and rests.

Mimic Military Progress

• How does one explain the Mimics relatively poor military progress after 5 years? From General Brigham's situation map, its clear that Spain, Most of Italy, all of Scandinavia, and pretty much all of Russia are free of mimics. The film shows the Mimics are extremely formidable individually. One or two wipe out all of J-squad alone, and that is with them all equipped with new-jacket tech. Modern human military mobilizations are notoriously slow, and constructing the elaborate mimic proof fortifications necessary to seal off all of Europe would be slower still. This makes the mimics slow progress all the more puzzling. They do not seem to need food(or at least complex logistics for food), or fuel(unlike human armies do),or sleep even?, nor do they have complicated, top down command structures to muddy things. Their slow progress might have been somewhat justified if they said humans had complete air-superiority and that helped slow the mimic advance, but once again, the mimics are shown to be able to destroy human aircraft with ease-transports or attack craft alike. Nor is water much of a barrier either as the mimics are in London within mere hours of the failure of operation Downfall. Based on loop where Cage deserts his post, all of the British Isles would be overrun literally within a day or two at most. The mimics can easily swim around most defences we could erect, be it in the north, or in the mediterranean. All of this taken together, makes one wonder why they haven't overrun the entire globe by now.
  • The mimics are not as tough as they appear from the Normandy beach scenes. The loop where Cage gains the reset power is not the first iteration of that battle. It's clear that the mimics know their strategy intimately from having fought it at least once, but likely several times before. If you look at the scenes where Cage or Rita go off-book, basically any of the scenes where they manage to clear the beach or the finale, and the mimics are a far more manageable threat. Cage manages to kill one with a rusty woodcutter's axe. Also, given that Rita had previously stolen their power and the Omega seems aware when this is occurring, it's possible the Omega became more cautious to avoid losing control of its power.
  • The Mimic's objectives are a complete mystery in the movie. Saying they should have completely overrun the whole planet in five years assumes they want to overrun the whole planet. Maybe they had to pupate more warriors after Verdun, or maybe they wanted to analyze the ground they already held before striking the humans again, or maybe they had to report their initial successes back to their masters via some sort of interstellar communication and wait for instructions.
  • This. The Mimics are very cautious, they save-scum, they do-over, they basically treat the whole war as if they're trying to get a perfect playthrough in a game on its hardest setting. And they can mess with time. Hurrying does not seem to be a priority for them.
  • They waited for humans to mobilize. They lost on purpose at Verdun. They wanted all the armed forces in one place to destroy them in one stroke and leave the rest of the planet wide open.
  • Also, maybe the Mimics can't go too far away from the Omega, and that thing looks really difficult to relocte.

Dissection?

• How does Rita know she was "dissected", since it presumably happened while she was dead? Did the gloopy scriptwriters not know the word for "vivisection"? And if so, WHY did They promptly resort to it?
  • It is Rita who uses the term "dissected" to Cage, and she's not a scientist. Maybe she didn't worry too much about using the exact technical terms for the horrible things they did to her on possibly several loops. As for why did they resort to it so quickly, there was a war on after all, and the human situation was desperate. The reset ability is a war-winner. Knowing her commitment to winning, Rita may have even volunteered, at least the first time.
  • More to the point, if they were operating on her, they would for sure have done blood transfusions, to keep her alive while studying what was happening.
  • It's entirely possible that this is just what she assumed would happen to her at some point when they restrained her in a medical facility, and started talking about examining her brain. The loops are stressful, and after so many times dying, seeing battle after battle, and watching at least one person she cared about get repeatedly killed, it's not difficult to imagine that she jumped to the worst possible conclusion for what they were planning.

Escaping Whitehall

• why did they bother trying to escape Whitehall once they got the transponder? when they used it in the car it didn't take very long to work, and doing it in front of Brigham would have let them drop something like a Grand Slam Earthquake bomb straight right up the Omega's chuff
  • See "Resetting Time".

Immediate Reset

• The day seems to restart immediately whenever Cage is killed (given his immediate reaction from getting killed to waking up screaming), when he was killed by bad timing when rolling underneath a truck, how did Farell have time to make an observation about it if the day should have been reset immediately? Rule of Funny?
  • Apparently he wasn't instantly killed by the truck. There was enough time for a quip from Farell before the day reset.
  • Since we virtually always see things from Cage's perspective, it's possible that the whole remainder of the day keeps on happening after he dies, only reverting when a fixed number of hours have passed since he woke up in handcuffs. But because he's kinda dead for that period, we don't actually see it play out.

The Frontline

• So, the reason why humanity is committing all of its forces to an all-or-nothing attack is because they believe wrongly that it will allow them to finally defeat the Mimics. Said attack takes place in Normandy. The thing that gave them that impression was the victory at Verdun. Verdun is in eastern France, Normandy in the north. How the hell did the Mimics miss Verdun? Did they just do like the Germans and stroke through Belgium?

Omega time travel

• Is it possible for Cage to die?
  • Sure he can. The Omega's time travel power seems to work differently, given it sent Cage farther back than the Alpha's did, so it could have a built-in failsafe to allow for "death by old age". And even if it doesn't, Cage can just get another blood transfusion to remove it for good.
  • The fact that killing the Omega triggered another reset is fridge horror in and of itself. One final trap of the mimics that humanity only avoided through sheer dumb luck. Unless hijacked via blood exposure, the resets favor the mimics, not the humans. Kill an Alpha, the timeline resets, the Alpha is restored. The final reset is probably intended to restore the Omega in the unlikely event that it is attacked without an Alpha reset being triggered.
  • Another possibility is that, failing a transfusion, he'd be in a situation akin to the novel Replay, running extremely long loops (decades long instead of a day or two long). While potentially unpleasant after enough "runs", also probably less horrifying than what he's already been through.
  • You can remove the mimic power by having a blood transfusion. No horrible lifetime runs needed.

Timelines

• At one point, Cage tries to roll under a passing truck and gets smeared on the ground - but unlike his other deaths, where we cut immediately to him waking up, this time we see Master Sergeant Farell look at the mess with puzzled disgust. That is, he keeps existing even though Cage is dead... implying that Cage is not merely going back in time and overwriting the timeline, but is instead jumping to a new timeline. So every time Cage dies, that timeline continues to exist, with the Mimics presumably winning the war and wiping out humanity. The only upside is that Rita would probably be killed by Mimics before she could be executed for murder.
  • Of course, assuming the Omega's power works the same way as Cage's, it's actually quite possible than in many of the initial timelines, humanity won, potentially even quite easily. And since it's the only "being" in the Mimic force, it wouldn't care about any timeline except the one it directly experiences and so would think nothing of resetting time whenever it loses so much as a single battle, caring nothing for the "old" timeline.
  • There is also the possibility that it took Cage that long to die after being run over, especially considering how Sgt. Farell asks him "What the hell were you thinking?"
  • Alternatively, it doesn't jump timelines or start a new one. It simply sends back information. As to why Cage resets to an earlier state, the Omega is trying desperately to load an older save, but it's already dead, so it overrides the old Omega with brain death. And since all the Mimics are extensions/part of the central nervous system, they die to, as seen with the grenade option.
    • Which would make it Omega Hodor
  • Rule of Funny likely applies here, with no implication intended about how timelines being overwritten or alternative universes being created. It may simply be a piece of black comedy where Cage fails awfully, gets run over, and the writers have Farell get in a quick one liner joke before resetting the plot. It isn't the only time Cage gets killed by a vehicle, in one loop he has a big heroic moment on the beach, only to get splattered by a quickly moving vehicle. Again, it's a piece of black comedy.
  • One possibility is that the final 'adapt to the humans' tactic that the Mimic hive mind will try is simply Screw This, I'm Outta Here. That the Omega was in fact alive at the start of those two days when the jump back happened, but decided 'no, this Earth invading lark is too much effort' and departed Earth in that 'energy surge' the general reports, given Cage is now back to his old rank, has his groundhog day ability back and knows exactly where to strike (along with having the rank to at least get listened to now)?

Heading for the Dam early

• Cage goes through hundreds or thousands of loops of the Normandy battle, trying to wade through the Curb-Stomp Battle to get to the dam far away from the beach. In the final loop, they steal a VTOL craft and head straight for the real location of the Big Bad before the battle starts, bypassing the clusterfuck at Normandy altogether. Why did they not try that to get to the dam? They seemingly had no problems getting to the VTOL or recruiting pilots despite having just escaped UDF custody after taking the CO hostage. Both would have been easier during the previous loops when they weren't wanted, and if they needed to Cage could have trial-an-error-ed learning to fly (as the movie notes he did with the small helicopter at the farm). Humanity might have been worse off if they had done so, since without Cage Taking a Level in Badass the trap at the dam might have worked if Cage had been too scared or weak to kill himself in time, but Cage and Rita didn't know that.
  • When would they have been able to do this? They wouldn't try doing it on the previous night as they would in the Final Loop because as far as they know at the time, the Dam really is the actual location and thus their understandable assumption is that the ENTIRETY of the Mimic Force would be between them and the Dam. Even taken by surprise, one VTOL full of soldiers would be easily wiped out since they would have the Mimics' entire focus, and no amount of loops would change it. The biggest reason they get as far as they do during Operation Hardfall is that the Mimics still have to devote a hefty amount of bodies to the actual armed forces attacking them, something that would no longer be the case if they try to do it the night before (and the biggest reason they succeed in the Final Loop is that a sizeable chunk of the Mimics are already at Normandy, unable to protect the surprise Louvre rush). As for trying to do it during the Operation, it would be significantly more difficult to commandeer the VTOL or have J Squad being willing to join their effort rather than the role they were already assigned. So TL;DR, if they do it the night before they would get annihilated due to the increase in forces they would have to deal with, and if they try it the day of there is no way they'd be able to get the VTOL or J Squad to begin with.