Robot Tom Cruise jumps from an explosion in first All You Need Is Kill pic!

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Doug Liman is a notoriously hard-to-please studio director. Sure, the guy’s got a magnificently stylish eye, but with this talent comes the streak of a huge perfectionism. This trait can often slow down or overcomplicate a production… or it can yield gorgeously badass results like a mechanized Tom Cruise jumping from a giant explosion (see the pic below).

I don’t think we even need a trailer to accompany this still from Liman’s Tom Cruise-fronted manga adaptation ALL YOU NEED IS KILL. Just slap that image up on a poster and you’ll have asses in seats. Sure, the premise sounds great (a post-apocalyptic alien invasion gets the GROUNDHOG DAY/SOURCE CODE treatment) and the film may have more to it than Tom Cruise in a robot suit. All I’m saying is I personally don’t need anything else to motivate me into buying a ticket.

The film also stars the gorgeous Emily Blunt (below) and the even more goregous Bill Paxton (not pictured below and that’s sarcasm, by the way). It’s based off the badass manga by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. Check out the pic and synopsis below and mark your clalendar for March 14, 2014, when AYNIK officially hits theaters.

The story unfolds in a near future in which a hive-like alien race, called Mimics, have hit the Earth in an unrelenting assault, shredding great cities to rubble and leaving millions of human casualties in their wake. No army in the world can match the speed, brutality or seeming prescience of the weaponized Mimic fighters or their telepathic commanders. But now the world’s armies have joined forces for a last stand offensive against the alien horde, with no second chances.

Lt. Col. Bill Cage (Cruise) is an officer who has never seen a day of combat when he is unceremoniously demoted and then dropped–untrained and ill-equipped–into what amounts to little more than a suicide mission. Cage is killed within minutes, managing to take an Alpha down with him. But, impossibly, he awakens back at the beginning of the same hellish day, and is forced to fight and die again… and again. Direct physical contact with the alien has thrown him into a time loop– dooming him to live out the same brutal combat over and over.

But with each pass, Cage becomes tougher, smarter, and able to engage the Mimics with increasing skill, alongside Special Forces warrior Rita Vrataski (Blunt), who has lain waste to more Mimics than anyone on Earth. As Cage and Rita take the fight to the aliens, each repeated battle becomes an opportunity to find the key to annihilating the alien invaders and saving the Earth.