Jump to content

Alita: Battle Angel

Goose

By Goose,
in Film, TV & Radio

 Share

Recommended Posts

Broker

Broker

Posted
Posted
On 08/02/2019 at 23:02, Zero9X said:

Thought it was really good. Felt condensed in places but moved really quickly. Great animation, motion capture and performances. 

 

It's taking plot beats from the first three volumes of the manga and mixing them into a tighter story so that might be why. Hopefully people will seek out the manga for a bit more background.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
DarhkFox

DarhkFox

Posted
Posted

I thought it was very enjoyable. Same with my friends I saw it with. 

 

 

 


However it doesn't really go too much into her flashbacks and the ending is a bit of a cop out , like it really needs a sequel now to finish the story. I heard a lot of people moaning about that after the film finished.

 

1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
linkster

linkster

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, Darhkwing said:

I thought it was very enjoyable. Same with my friends I saw it with. 

 

 

  Hide contents

 

 


However it doesn't really go too much into her flashbacks and the ending is a bit of a cop out , like it really needs a sequel now to finish the story. I heard a lot of people morning about that after the film finished.

 

 

I thought it was so off hand how they dealt with her loss of memory - like she can apparently remember exactly what to say, how to walk, deal with people, just nothing that relates to the plot. It’s kind of insulting given how things have come so far with The Last of Us and other great narratives but the story for this movie plays out like the average video game

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Charliemouse

Charliemouse

Posted
Posted
41 minutes ago, Darhkwing said:

I thought it was very enjoyable. Same with my friends I saw it with. 

 

  Hide contents

 


However it doesn't really go too much into her flashbacks and the ending is a bit of a cop out , like it really needs a sequel now to finish the story. I heard a lot of people moaning about that after the film finished.

 

Well as the film only covers half of the manga, the ending of the film was always going to be like that, but then I guess most people who have watched this at the cinema wont even know what manga is.

 

Hopefully it will do well enough to get a sequel, as the manga gets a lot better in the latter half.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
SeanR

SeanR

Posted
Posted
7 hours ago, Darhkwing said:

I actually think this will do better than all the doom and gloom the media are saying about it. 2019s first box office bomb etc. From everything i've seen people are quite favourable about it.

 

is it going to bomb harder than 2018s Mortal Engines?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
linkster

linkster

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Mr. Gerbik said:

For those who've seen it and are familiar with the original (excellent) manga, does the movie really go up to volume 3? Is there actual motorball in the movie?

 

yes there is. it's good fun to watch, but the commentator is laughably bad. It's like he's reading a magazine while saying "I've never seen anything like this"

 

 

1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
catinthehat

catinthehat

Posted
Posted

Saw this yesterday in an almost empty cinema.  I liked a lot of it, but it seemed to be an awful mash-up of random stories in places.  It's like they had so many great ideas, they just tried to cram in as many as possible, without actually working out a way to make them fit together.


The whole rollerball thing made no sense at all.  Why was that even in the movie? There was so much going on in her life at that stage, it made no sense for her to start playing that game.  And where did her feet go?  Did she just leave them in the locker room or something?

 

I came out thinking I really enjoyed it, so that's a good thing.  And my kids loved it.  And it looked amazing in places (although pretty dodgy in others).  So yeah, by no means a classic, and could probably have been done better over two films, but still an enjoyable couple of hours.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
linkster

linkster

Posted
Posted
52 minutes ago, catinthehat said:

The whole rollerball thing made no sense at all.  Why was that even in the movie? There was so much going on in her life at that stage, it made no sense for her to start playing that game.  

Wasn't it to raise cash for them both to make it to the floating city?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
linkster

linkster

Posted
Posted
8 minutes ago, Treble said:

The champion gets a pass into Zalem.

Which TBH is even stupider ...

So I assume it was Ed Norton we saw at the end - he's the one who sets the rules, if he's locked himself away to stay safe from assassins then why on earth would he honour a gift that only he can give? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
catinthehat

catinthehat

Posted
Posted
23 minutes ago, Treble said:

The champion gets a pass into Zalem.

 

But...

 

Spoiler

She showed that she can get to Zalem if she wants to, when she jumped over the defence ring thing in her new body.  If she really wants to go there, she can just do that.  But why does she want to go there?  That wasn't explained at all.  Early on it was because she wanted to take her BFF up there, before she found out he was a complete ass.  But then even once he was dead she carried on with the monkeyball thing. It made no sense.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Treble

Treble

Posted
Posted

I think there's 2 factors at play: naivety and legitimacy. 

Spoiler

 

Alita naively thinks Zalem plays a straight game and isn't completely controlled by Nova. 

 

She also wants to get in legitimately so she's not just permanently on the run. 

 

And I think she wants to get back because it's where she came from and will have more answers. Particularly about what happened with URM, how the battle bots lived when the war ended, how come she managed to get so old, etc. 

 

 

It's not told very well, but makes sense I guess. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
linkster

linkster

Posted
Posted
On 09/02/2019 at 20:39, Fierce Poodle said:

 

I like Kermode usually, but that review is all over the place. Very odd.

He’s basically narrating a Wikipedia page. It ‘reads’ more than you listen to it. Such dry factual observations about how it exists within a by now accepted narrative of cyborgs, future tech noir, and I think comments on how it doesn’t really dwell on any of the philosophical aspects of that in order to get to the action. It’s far more forgiving than it ought to be in some ways. I was really scathing of GIST for seeming to dumb down a great story whereas what I maybe meant was the crime was actually to be dull. This isn’t!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Broker

Broker

Posted
Posted

Well, I watched this today. Obviously loved the manga for years and had very high expectations, and I absolutely fucking loved it. The CG was weird in places, her face didn't always look great and the dialogue and performances ranged from hammy to convincing. But it actually does a great job of capturing the feel of the manga, which I wasn't expecting at all. The costumes and details are spot on, it's absolutely crammed with little details and easter eggs from the manga and it lays the groundwork effectively for lots of the stuff that comes later. The changes are handled well. So yeah, tough to judge how it would feel to a newcomer but as a fan I found it very satisfying.

 

19 hours ago, Charliemouse said:

Well as the film only covers half of the manga, the ending of the film was always going to be like that, but then I guess most people who have watched this at the cinema wont even know what manga is.

 

Hopefully it will do well enough to get a sequel, as the manga gets a lot better in the latter half.

 

It's not even half really. The story we get here is from the first two volumes, with a small amount of motorball chucked in. Really though, plot wise this is volumes one and two of a nine volume series, which itself is the first of three series'. 

 

10 hours ago, Mr. Gerbik said:

For those who've seen it and are familiar with the original (excellent) manga, does the movie really go up to volume 3? Is there actual motorball in the movie?

 

 

Not up to volume three at all, but there is motorball. It's the story that formed the core of the OVA, but with a motorball scene stuck in the middle (which is actually nice as motorball does just show up around volume 3). There's some remixing of the overall plot to introduce Nova earlier, and more teases about her past than I would have expected given how far off that stuff is in the manga, so I guess maybe they'd bring that forward. The backstory looks substantially different, but had a similar feel. It's surprisingly faithful in many areas.

 

8 hours ago, catinthehat said:

The whole rollerball thing made no sense at all.  Why was that even in the movie? There was so much going on in her life at that stage, it made no sense for her to start playing that game.  And where did her feet go?  Did she just leave them in the locker room or something?

 

Spoiler

Vector told Hugo that he would get Alita a motorball audition, which made Hugo think that she could become champion and go with him to Zalem. Really though Vector had set up the trap for her. 

 

In the manga she has totally separate bodies for motorball and regular life, in fact in the final motorball scene she's got the motorball body from the manga. Not sure about her berserker feet.

 

6 hours ago, linkster said:

Which TBH is even stupider ...

 

  Hide contents

So I assume it was Ed Norton we saw at the end - he's the one who sets the rules, if he's locked himself away to stay safe from assassins then why on earth would he honour a gift that only he can give? 

 

 

Spoiler

It's possible he's experimenting on the champions. In the manga he's certainly not in charge of Zalem, just important enough to fuck with the surface people.

 

6 hours ago, catinthehat said:

 

But...

 

  Hide contents

She showed that she can get to Zalem if she wants to, when she jumped over the defence ring thing in her new body.  If she really wants to go there, she can just do that.  But why does she want to go there?  That wasn't explained at all.  Early on it was because she wanted to take her BFF up there, before she found out he was a complete ass.  But then even once he was dead she carried on with the monkeyball thing. It made no sense.

 

 

Spoiler

I assume she wants to go there to try to find out about her past, which is set up when Hugo tells her she fell from there and then expanded upon when she remembers that she was attacking Zalem and was their enemy. However, you'd assume her just bolting up the clearly well defended wire might not work, as in the flashback you clearly see that her and a whole team of other soldiers like her are struggling to climb the wire. Then when they get too high up Zalem cuts the wire anyway. So I guess she's trying to get the champion's pass to Zalem so she can get up there and ask some questions/kill everyone.

 

4
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Nick R

Nick R

Posted
Posted

I went looking for the old interview with Cameron where I remembered him implying that he was essentially only making Avatar ("Project 880") in order to develop the VFX tech needed to make Battle Angel Alita, to see if I was misremembering it.

 

I didn't find that one, but I did find one of the other reports on this film that got me so excited about it the best part of 15 years ago. The comments about high frame rate 3D make interesting reading in retrospect:

http://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/22599

 

So, it's safe to say I've been looking forward to this film for a long time. (Yet in the intervening years, I never sought out the manga or the anime - sorry!) And now I've seen the finished thing...

 

Urm...

 

It's not great. There's a fair amount of cringeworthy stuff in the screenplay, without being outweighed by those memorable, quotable lines that all our favourite Cameron scripts have.

 

The aim of getting up to the upper city did not seem as vital as the similar goal in Elysium; whether the post-apocalyptic surface was a bad place to live or not largely seemed to depend on whether we saw it at day or at night.

 

But it does deliver all the smashy waif-fu cyborg action you could want, and some great images (e.g. Alita walking along the bottom of the lake). Which I realise is the sort of defence that normally gets applied to the Transformers films, and I wish I could offer a more nuanced reason for liking it. But I enjoyed it, and they seemed to cram a lot into it; when it finished, I thought it's running time must have been closer to 2hr30, not because it sagged, but because of how much it covered.

 

Incidentally, the end credits seemed really short compared to other big-budget VFX-packed blockbusters (and since the MCU started doing its post-credits bits, I have sat through a lot of those). I wonder if Rodriguez's well-known preference for shooting economically had anything to do with that?

 

 

Ranking compared to other recent transhumanist/AI/cyborg movies:

 

Blade Runner 2049 > Ex Machina > Alita: Battle Angel > Ghost in the Shell 2017

2
Link to comment
Share on other sites
strider

strider

Posted
Posted

I watched this last night.

It was surprisingly violent and brutal for a 12A which I certainly wasn't expecting.

 

I quite like the world, but the CGI is all over the place. Alita looks alright but all the other cyborgs look terrible due to their naff looking faces. I think it's going to age really poorly over time for that very reason. It's painfully derivative (although you could tell that from the trailers) and the love story is awful (one sequence that was clearly going for feels had me howling with laughter) and you could see all the big plots twists coming from a mile away. Considering how much of a passion project its been it's surprisingly poor for something Cameron is involved with.

I did like the action sequences but I just found the entire thing incredibly bland. I did like Alita though, she's a nice spunky character and Waltz was surprisingly decent as well.

2.5/5

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Bazjam

Bazjam

Posted
Posted

Loved it. Went in expecting the worst after all the reviews but I thought they did a great job bringing the manga to life. I read the first two volumes of the excellent manga last week, so maybe that helped me buy into the story more. Can’t wait to read the rest now.

 

also, I had absolutely no problem with how it ended. After reading some reviews I was expecting it to stop halfway through a fight or something, but I felt I rapped up what is the first part of a continuing story perfectly fine.

1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Bazjam

Bazjam

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, Darhkwing said:

I really hope they make a sequel to this. I thought Alita herself was a great character and want to see more of this world and story.

 

I'm looking forward to watching it again for sure.

I hope so too. Think it opens in the US today so we'll have to see how it does. It always pisses me off that these films get labelled flops before they come out due to advance tracking. Surely a self fulfilling prophecy as that becomes the press attention for the film.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Wiper

Wiper

Posted
Posted
On 14/02/2019 at 01:23, yakumo said:

This is probably the 2nd best anime movie live adaption. Edge of tomorrow being the first. Really fun and 90s action anime.

 

Ignoring the bit where Edge of Tomorrow was based on a light novel, not anime,* this is clearly nonsense because:

791627405_SpeedRacer.thumb.jpg.9a02a6c6aea44bfdb5bd953e5111f28e.jpg

 

*unless there is an anime adaptation of All You Need is Kill, in which case I would be delighted to learn more because that's a book I'd love to see as an OVA

5
Link to comment
Share on other sites
yakumo

yakumo

Posted
Posted
Just now, Wiper said:

 

Ignoring the bit where Edge of Tomorrow was based on a light novel, not anime,* this is clearly nonsense because:

791627405_SpeedRacer.thumb.jpg.9a02a6c6aea44bfdb5bd953e5111f28e.jpg

 

*unless there is an anime adaptation of All You Need is Kill, in which case I would be delighted to learn more because that's a book I'd love to see as an OVA

OK you got me there, Speed Racer is criminally underrated. 

3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. Use of this website is subject to our Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and Guidelines.

  I accept