So I’m feeling that familiar, hollywood-inspired, mix of anticipation and terror/anxiety (anxicipation? anticipiety?) that comes with a book I like being made into a movie.

I first read all you need is kill a couple years ago, and enjoyed it a great deal. A few awkward bits of writing here and there but that could just be the translation. Occasionally the effort to turn a ‘hip’ young dialect into english can be a little interesting. The book follows Keiji Kiriya, a young Japanese recruit in a United Defense Force defending the planet from incredibly hard to kill alien invaders. He pilots a mechanized suit of armour, and dies an agonizng death only to wake up and relive the previous couple days. And again. And again. Like groundhog day and vanquish mashed into war of the worlds. Apparently the author was intrigued by the real-world implications/possibility of a videogame-style respawn effect. For sci-fi fans (especially fans of mecha and anime) I definitely recommend it.
I am picking it up again *now* because I’ve discovered there’s a movie coming out in 2014, and I want to reread it before I get too close to the release. While I may or may not end up enjoying hollywood’s version, they’re definitely planning on changing some stuff, and I’ll probably be better off without having the book too fresh in my mind.
So what makes me so sure they’re planning to mess about with the book I liked so much? Remember young, inexperienced rookie jacket pilot Keiji Kiriya, of the UDF’s Japanese component? Meet ‘merican Sgt Bill Cage, as played by Tom Cruise. Given that the whole point to me was that some inexperienced young nobody is granted innumerable deaths and uses them to become one of the greatest warriors the world has ever seen, it seems ludicrous to replace the raw recruit with an experienced soldier. Never mind the hollywood obsession with turning every tailor-made asian role into a white guy. Seems extra weird since the book makes a big deal of there being an American Special Forces squad assisting in the defense of Honshu. I look forward to some fantastically cutting remarks from George Takei.