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Alita: Battle Angel (July 2018)

I'm not familiar with the source material, and I'd like to see the film again, but I agree the character of Hugo could have been worked a bit better. Rosa had some funny stories about the difficulty of using the performance capture suit, particularly in the bridge kiss scene (her real hair was done up under the suit, and they wound up sticking some yarn to better simulate it so that it was less awkward for Hugo's actor to brush away non-existent digital hair and seem genuine :D).
 
Redfern said:
Maybe if they showed Hugo "snapping" upon hearing Ido discuss the impossibility of reaching it and showing him "driven over the edge" as he ascended the cable, it might have had greater impact. But that's a fairly minor quibble over an otherwise excellent movie.
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This was so strange to me that they show him reacting to what Ido says about no one reaching Zalem and have him climb, but making that climb seem more like a desperate attempt to escape rather than driven to madness about reaching an unattainable goal. Foreshadowing it at the beginning of the film when he says, "If I had legs like that I'd climb to Zalem" (paraphrased) made it seem more like he was like, "hot damn now's my chance!" As if this was always some emergency plan.

Also agreed Iron City looked like a cool place to live but Scrap Iron City was depicted as a literal dump, because it's a city made from scrap Iron and garbage, violence is everywhere. The grunge was toned down a lot and a truer version of this would have been rated-R but then the teenage love story would have needed to been handled waaay better to accommodate something that heavy. The scene where the dog gets killed is gruesome in the anime and one of those iconic scenes that I would have liked to see in the hypothetical R-rated. And I definitely feel like they would have loved to have done that, there is a part where Gashugan says he wants to squeeze Alita's head between his fingers until it pops and that is definitely a move many of the bad guys do to victims in the source material.

Don't get me wrong, though. This movie was worth the wait and treated with the reverence it deserved in its creation. I'm betting Kishiro loved it too and that makes me happy.
 
RT critics score 60%, audience score 93%.

Once again the critics prove how out of touch they are with the everyday reality of kicking back and having a good time at the movies with a bowl of popcorn.

Kor
 
Critics be damned when I disagree, lol.

I wasn't like blown away by the news that it'd be directed by Rodriguez but I changed my tuned by the first trailer. The fight scenes were so well done; exactly how I'd imagine manga/anime fights to look in real life. Please! Someone grab this man and make an American live-action version of Attack on Titan! He has the eye to make those types of fights work.
 
Kor said:
RT critics score 60%, audience score 93%.

Once again the critics prove how out of touch they are with the everyday reality of kicking back and having a good time at the movies with a bowl of popcorn.
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The way those percentages are calculated is so flawed that the numbers are essentially meaningless, though. They use a different method of calculating the critic score than they use for the audience score, so they can't even really be compared -- it's apples and oranges. And the critic scores are calculated based on a strict up/down ranking, which loses any of the nuances or ambiguities in the actual reviews.

Really, it's getting it backward to treat the aggregate numbers as the most important thing on a review aggregating site. They're the least important part, just a rough first-glance overview that should ideally be followed up by reading the individual reviews. There was this one movie -- I think it was Batman v Superman or Justice League -- where there was all this coverage of how the critic score was 20-some percent and the audience score was 80-some, or something like that. But when I actually read the specific reviews, I found that the bulk of the professional reviewers and the bulk of the audience reviewers said almost exactly the same thing -- that the movie had massive structural and story flaws but was still an entertaining ride. The supposed huge difference was partly because critics and audiences weigh the two things differently, but it was largely just an artifact of the really, really bad and misleading way that the aggregates are calculated, and the misguided tendency of the public to place too much importance on the aggregates rather than reading the actual reviews.
 
Alita Battle Angel
Based on a manga of the same name. In a post apocalyptic 26th century city a cyborg girl is discovered on a trash heap, but that is just the beginning of the story. What follows is a journey of discovery as the girl seeks out information on who she is and where she came from. There are a few plot lines, but they mainly focus on Alita's journey, and on the people around her. These include Dr. Dyson Dio, the scientist who discovered her, and Hugo, a human who dreams of moving to the sky city of Zalem (which looms in the background both physically and figuratively).
There are many aspects to Alita's journey which are covered. Firstly there is the backstory as to who and what she is. The hints are dropped throughout the story, slowly, leading in a believable manner from the previous revelation. Highly Advanced technology, as an enemy combatant in the war that destroyed the other sky cities. This is revealed in a very effective manner. The various flashbacks that occur as she remembers flashes of her past are not gratuitous. That overcomes all the problems that comes her way is realistic.
However that certainly isn't all to her story. There is also Hugo, and her relationship with him. It may seem fast, but it leads to a very effective climax. For not only is Alita developed, so is Hugo, as a rather tragic figure. He is given promises, and he is willing to go to extreme length to deliver his end of those bargains. The conflict that arises as a result of his relationship with Alita and the deeds he and a couple of his friends commit causes a personal crisis for both him and Alita, especially as Alita had signed up to be a Hunter-Warrior.
Of course, any good story has antagonists, and film has many. There are other Hunter-Warriors, Dio's ex-wife Chirrin, various cyborg assassins and Vector, who runs the Motorball gamex (and other aspects of life in the city). All these antagonists prove to be obstacles to Alita (and Hugo) in various ways, but it is Vector who seems to be the main villain. But it turns out that Vector is as trapped as Hugo is, with someone living in Zalem using him as a puppet. Overall, this is a very interesting film. 9.25/10.
 
I liked it. Was better than I was expecting though still not as good as it could have been. They had too many plots going on that could have held off for a sequel.
 
Regardless if there's going to be a sequel or not, the ending left a lot to be desired.

Other than that, I enjoyed it well enough. I knew nothing of the source material beforehand, but that didn't seem to matter much.
 
I quite liked it, but I think they crammed too much plot inside. I believe they could have skipped all the motorball thing for example...

A friend of mine, that watched the movie with me and didn't know the original material, couldn't follow the continuous mini-info dumps ("Panzer Kunst"? "Berserk"? "URM"?) and I had to recap some point of the plot to her after the movie... (she liked it too, however!)
 
In the original manga and in the one shot anime, yeah, there was nothing about motorball. In the manga, that was the next story arc, and it was Alita's method of "dealing" with (or more aptly, trying to blot out) Hugo's fate. She and Ito also had a major "falling out" by this point. But I get the feeling Cameron really craved to include something about that sport just in case there is no sequel. Oh, I don't begrudge his desire to include it, and I think the idea of a "qualifying round" (that's actually a "trap") was a clever way to slip it into the existing story. Again, referencing the manga, when we do come into the story, (I think) Alita has already been which the circuit for awhile. (It has been a few years since I've read those chapters, so I could be mistaken.)
 
Ok, can anyone kindly explain to me why MRAers are saying that Alita is a good movie with a right female representation, in opposition to the "SJW crapfest" that is Captain Marvel...? Now I'm feeling dirty because I liked the former...
 
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Skipper said:
Ok, can anyone kindly explain to me why MRAers are saying that Alita is a good movie with a right female representation, in opposition to the "SJW crapfest" that is Captain Marvel...? Now I'm feeling dirty because I liked the former...
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If that's the basis you use to judge whether or not you like a movie, you should just quit going to the movies. Most (if not all) of this angsty MRA/SJW shit is generated by fans and has nothing to do with the actual movies themselves.
 
Yeah -- given that the MRAs' reasons for hating things are stupid and wrong, surely their reasons for liking things are just as stupid and wrong and shouldn't taint our enjoyment. People like that often convince themselves that a work of fiction supports their ideology when it really doesn't come close. Like people who think that Star Trek is just a show about white men blowing up nasty aliens and get angry when it gets "polluted" with messages about diversity, equality, and understanding.
 
Skipper said:
Ok, can anyone kindly explain to me why MRAers are saying that Alita is a good movie with a right female representation, in opposition to the "SJW crapfest" that is Captain Marvel...? Now I'm feeling dirty because I liked the former...
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This kind of thinking annoys me because Alita is a good movie with a lot of heart to it but people are averse to praising it because of this very reason.

I'm going to say this I enjoyed Alita a bit more than Captain Marvel and the reasoning had nothing to do with politics, I just liked it a bit more in the theatre. And yes I'm concerned that opinion will lead to me being accused of being an alt-right "incel" or something.

This is why we can't have nice things
 
Sorry to bump the thread, but I just got out of the theater and have to say that I seriously hope Disney execs realize the goldmine they just acquired in getting the IP rights to this film.

In an era where female-led franchises are finally being recognized as being profitable, Disney has a hit-in-the-making with where the first Alita film leaves off and a golden opportunity to expand their genre footprint with a kick-ass new character that I think a lot of people quite frankly slept on.
 
DigificWriter said:
Sorry to bump the thread, but I just got out of the theater and have to say that I seriously hope Disney execs realize the goldmine they just acquired in getting the IP rights to this film.

In an era where female-led franchises are finally being recognized as being profitable, Disney has a hit-in-the-making with where the first Alita film leaves off and a golden opportunity to expand their genre footprint with a kick-ass new character that I think a lot of people quite frankly slept on.
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This movie was a MASSIVE flop. Disney isn't touching it with a 10 foot pole.
 
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