Everything up until Cage's first death was pretty hard for me to follow. I didn't understand why pretty much anyone was trying to do, but I analyzed it again. One thing I'm quite sure of is that General Brigham is unreasonably evil in his treatment of Cage. He was forced to die for the military, completely against his will, his freedoms usurped.  Forcing him into their ranks was cruel and unusual punishment; they sent a non-combat ready PUBLIC AFFAIRS officer to be traumatized and die in a modern D-Day against ALIENS because he wasn't qualified for the job and therefore refused. His refusal was ignored by Brigham, so in desperation he threatened to blame him for when the attack went wrong. This desperation and the action borne of it is very much in character; he's never been in combat, doesn't know the first thing about it. So obviously he doesn't feel qualified and would feel quite terrified to be given control over all the UDF's forces for the upcoming invasion of France, for which he'd only have a couple hours to prepare. But he does know public affairs, so he plays to his strengths, because he knows how easy it would be to threaten Brigham's position. This obviously backfired; he was "arrested," more like abducted, and sent to UDF's Heathrow Airport military base. Which is pretty evil. He could have just taken it up with Cage's superiors and had him court martialed. You're telling me a man in Brigham's position couldn't do something to punish him or ruin his career without killing him behind the back of his military allies? The American military would surely be livid to hear that Brigham CIA'd one of their own public affairs officers to die in a battle he wasn't qualified to lead *because* he refused to lead it *because* he knew he wasn't qualified. I don't even believe Brigham when he says he already had approval from Cage's superiors to give him those orders. Especially considering his actions directly afterward indicate that he knows how to bend the rules and is willing to lie to military collaborators to manipulate them to do what he wants.

Now, Sergeant Farell didn't know exactly what he was doing, as Brigham had demoted Cage to Private, falsely labeled him as a deserter, and alleged that his officer's uniform was the result of him stealing one in order to desert. But Farell isn't entirely innocent, far from it. He makes the executive decision to put what he understands to be a private with absolutely no combat skills whatsoever, into a Squad that will be on the front lines of their attack the next morning. The only training he gets is "some Basic," and all we see of this in the film is him with the rest of J-Squad doing a lap within Heathrow, and push-ups if Cage, or presumably any of the others, misbehave. They refuse to help him know even the basic functions of his suit, which besides being evil and cruel, actively puts the rest of them in danger. They put him in a suit that he didn't even know how to operate. Why would you ever give a soldier a gun when they don't even know how to turn off the safety? Not only are they attempting to kill a man whose only crime was insubordination/blackmail (which is a stretch), they also are putting the rest of their company in danger by forcing him into their ranks. He could sabotage the mission in a million ways when he doesn't know how to operate this dangerous weaponry. J-Squad should be absolutely pissed at Farell; what kind of a Sergeant would put such a woefully unprepared man into this position? The base is on lockdown and you believe he's a deserter claiming to be an officer; it makes sense he would refuse to give him a phone call. But you're going to deploy the next day and you see that he hasn't a single clue what he's doing. You're putting your entire Squad and potentially the mission itself in jeopardy. Is this what we do with deserters? Give them highly powered modern weapons in the form of mech suits that they don't even know how to operate? Put them into the front lines the next day? So they can face the threat of death they hoped to avoid by deserting and do something rash with the equipment they don't understand? It's evident Brigham wanted him killed for his reasonable actions, he's evil, I get that. But sending him into combat doesn't guarantee that he gets killed without bringing harm to your own soldiers. They're not immune to bullets; he could go rogue and attempt to kill as many of their own men as he could out of spite for him being there. He doesn't know how to operate it, there are a million things he could do that could accidentally kill their Squadmates or worse. Why Farell follows those orders given the situation is beyond me. You could argue he dismisses Cage's grievances as deceit, but wouldn't his Squadmates be concerned at his qualification? Wouldn't they bring it up to Farell? That they feel endangered by his presence in their Squad? Why would they mock him right before landing? Yes, he's a dead man, but you could be as well due to his predicament. This is a narrative problem; the writers entirely missed the fact that a single unprepared or unqualified soldier doesn't mean one dead man, it could potentially mean his entire squad. I could provide endless examples, but to keep it broad and simple, what if they're trying to kill an alien, Alpha or otherwise, and his incompetence causes their position to be revealed? The entire inciting incident is predicated on cruelty, pride, and an astounding lack of understanding of the consequences of unqualified individuals being placed into combat roles.

If I recall correctly, we don't see their basic training jog in the first day. I have a contention with this. In a Groundhog Day-style film like this, it's very important that we see the initial permutation of the day in as much of its entirety as possible, otherwise we may get confused, thinking that a sequence is the result of the protagonist's actions rather than something that would have happened independent of him. However, I appreciate their ability to utilize the strengths of this format. One big advantage is that once we've seen enough of the looping, we can assume that new skills or knowledge the protagonist suddenly has were acquired in previous unseen loops. This is one of the few situations where the skipping of exposition is almost better than keeping it in. How does he know how their ships work and how to pilot them? Well he's been loading the same save state for years, potentially, having done nearly everything he could possibly have done in that single day looped over and over again. It's great to see this format used in a combat scenario with very high stakes, because many films of this style confine the actions of the protagonist to conversations and social interactions only, hardly ever involving death. In this film, the loop is maintained by death, and the lives of millions in this war on the aliens are our stakes, which is pretty fresh for this format. I really want to see Vatraski's loop at Verdun made into a film and I'd love to see an extended cut.