Why do they not start the search the same day?

Question

In the movie Live. Die. Repeat. (a.k.a. Edge of Tomorrow) the soldier and the Angel of Verdun together are searching for the Omega.

I am aware there is a time loop! But Tom Cruise every time wake up on "day 1" and the army starts its fight on "day 2", where he dies.

Reading this question on movie.SE: Why does Bill Cage wake up in the Helicopter? the timeline is like this:

1.Wakes up in the early morning on helicopter. Meets General, gets tazed.

2.A few hours pass.

3.Cage wakes up in the mid to late morning. This is where the time loops reset to throughout the film.

4.Day of training on the military base.

5.Day ends.

The next day, the invasion occurs. During that day, they wake up, get in gear, and ship out; hours would have passed during all that. Then Cage manages to kill the Alpha, and get its blood mixed with his own. This must have happened 24 hours after step 2 above, during the hours that Cage was out.

Why do they wait until the next morning? Why do they not start the same day the soldier comes to meet the Angel of Verdun after he wakes up?

Answer 1

Because they have to get to France and so need the cover of the invading army to do that. Also remember every time loop Cage has to go through the same dialogue of explaining who he is, what has happened, what went wrong last time what needs to be improved or changed. Maybe he decides that to overcome where he died he needs to train more in a particular style or form of fighting.

Also he is a private who has been accused of being a deserter, if he tries to get to France ahead of the invasion the odds are he would be caught and killed, or shot down, or just stopped. For that matter we don't know that he wasn't remember we didn't see every time loop he lived through, it may just be that after 1000 attempts to leave the base on day 1 to get to the battle he figured that wasn't going to work.

Answer 2

I'm going to try to answer this. Tom Cruise's character (Cage) in the movie was a Major who had no combat experience and was bumped down to Private at the beginning of the movie. Nobody believed he was anything but a Private, so no higher-ranking soldier or officer would have listened to him. He also had no combat experience whatsoever, which is part of why he died repeatedly. Emily Blunt's character (Rita), on the other hand, was a seasoned combat veteran who found out that Cage could loop time.

Okay. So the first time that they met, Cage had died and fought enough times that he had basically given himself combat training, but he still wasn't on the same level as Rita. He tries to save her, she realizes he can loop time, and tells him to come find her again. He does so.

Now here's where I think the answer to your question lies: Cage was self-trained enough to handle that one battle but a few hours of training does not make up for the years of training, fighting, and conditioning that Rita had already gone through. So she needed to keep training him until he was comparable to her own level, or at least get him to the best point he could be while also formulating a surefire plan to go hunt for the alien "brain".

So they couldn't just have started their hunt the "first time they met" because A. they hadn't yet formulated their plan for it and B. Cage was inferior in both rank and training and Rita would never have been OK with him coming along unless he was skilled.

On a side note, in the movie we see at least one instance (the bit with the farmhouse and the helicopter) that the pair only get as far as they do because Cage's timeloop power allowed him to know what was coming and where the aliens were located. So it was beneficial for them to make multiple failed attempts because Cage, at least, could learn from their mistakes the next time around.