Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

If you're going to do a "live action" adaptation, just stick with normal people. Anime eyes work in anime because it's obviously not real.

 Gitzbitah wrote:
They are really hammering a lot of content into this film! I can't believe the racers got into the mix.

I hope its just foreshadowing or presenting it as something the world has. If they try to cram her origin, first battle, the whole love affair and the race into one film - yeah I can't see how that would work without seriously cutting out huge chunks or changing major elements to make them fit. It's just way to much plot for 120mins to cover faithfully, baring in mind that they've already got to establish the characters and world at the start of the film.

Of course, they could be looking to make this a franchise, with sequels to cover later points of the manga.

Franchises and sequels only work when the first film is good.

If it's like, say, Suicide Squad, or the Mummy, then the franchise kinda dies before it starts.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I'm not sure if I'm drifting back to the opinion that the Anime Eyes look weird, however the rest of the action obviously is going to be fantastic.

Eh. A lot of the transitions between CGI and 'real' stick out to me as awkwardly noticeable, to the point that I find it jarring and overly fake. But then I'm not a big fan of CGI action anyway, it mostly puts me to sleep, as most directors seem to go full hog on the action and put the plot and characters on hold for the duration.

I also don't like the choice of actress for this particular character. Her voice and mannerisms don't fit the character at all. I remember the character as a fairly lost young girl, and the actress is too much a self confident woman in her late 20s/early 30s. She'd likely be fantastic in another role, but fits poorly here.

Maybe they picked her for her physicality? That she's petite and acrobatic? Though I have to imagine there are other gymnasts they could (should) have selected.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
Franchises and sequels only work when the first film is good.

If it's like, say, Suicide Squad, or the Mummy, then the franchise kinda dies before it starts.

Agreed. There are quite a few movies out there that could have become franchises and died because the initial offering tanked, or just plain sucked.

Hopefully this is not one of them.

there are people predicting a billion dollars for this and man... I really do not see it. I don't think it'll flop (relatively low budget) but it won't be huge either.

 cole1114 wrote:
there are people predicting a billion dollars for this and man...

Seriously?

I'm an anime fan and I'm completely turned off by the visual design. Granted, I'm not really a fan of the original work and haven't ever read it, but those eyes... ugh. It looks like someone just went into photo shop and used the bubble effect on them. If they were going for an uncanny valley thing I applaud the idea, but the execution is a little excessive and just looks bad in a bad way rather than odd/weird in a good way.

Then again it is James Cameron. There's what, Dark Angel and Strange Days as failures on his filmography list, and then a heaping mountain of dollar bills?

What about Virus, with Jamie Lee Curtis? That was by Cameron, right?

Not according to the infobox on wikipedia, which is about all the checking I did :/

 cole1114 wrote:
there are people predicting a billion dollars for this

The studio spent $150M on it, so they're looking for a $500M breakeven.

They didn't spend Avengers money to get Avengers revenue. They spent Ant-Man money to get Ant-Man revenue.

Il watch it for sure. It looks good visually and appears to have good action and maybe a compelling story with decent to good acting in the trailers.

I am WAY less interested in the 4 or 5 Avatar sequels we are getting. But I do think it's hilarious he's gunna be churning them out. I can't wait for them to start bombing.

I loved the manga, way back in the day when I was keeping up with it.

I'll definitely give this movie a shot.

 Overread wrote:

 Gitzbitah wrote:
They are really hammering a lot of content into this film! I can't believe the racers got into the mix.

I hope its just foreshadowing or presenting it as something the world has. If they try to cram her origin, first battle, the whole love affair and the race into one film - yeah I can't see how that would work without seriously cutting out huge chunks or changing major elements to make them fit. It's just way to much plot for 120mins to cover faithfully, baring in mind that they've already got to establish the characters and world at the start of the film.

That was my thought too--hopefully, it won't be "Last Airbender" levels of graceless plot compression. The Motorball arc was fun in itself in the manga, but was largely a breather arc that didn't have much influence on the larger story beyond

So, thoughts on seeing it today, bearing I'm a big fan of the manga and I was consciously reminding myself it's not going to be the same:

It's very obvious this is being aimed at the young adult market. It doesn't clash with the source material as much as you might expect it to, given that the plot of the original is "young woman with mysterious past and cool powers in a dystopian setting governed by oppressive authority figures";. But there are places where it drags, mainly spending a lot of time on the utterly generic romance with the utterly generic cute "bad boy but not really" (which to the film's credit, is resolved largely the same way as it was in the manga). That said, I did prefer the movie's way of dealing with the Alita / Ido relationship to the manga.

There are scenes where it's very obvious that stuff got cut to get the rating. The "puts blood under her eyes as warpaint" scene doesn't work well, because we can't actually show where the blood came from. With that said, the characters being cyborgs mean there is the amount of violence and dismemberment I was expecting, even if the fight scenes did feel a bit more weightless than I would have liked.

The script....is very much the weak spot. Again, it felt like a lot of time was being spent on generic teen drama, there are some downright cringeworthy lines and overly fortunate coincidences. Jennifer Connelly's character.....just felt kind of redundant, though she did have a serviceable motivation and felt like she bought a little more to the movie than "we're saving Nova for the sequel". The idea that this one character is prejudiced towards cyborgs comes out of nowhere for some conflict, and then goes nowhere. And there's one antagonist who gets hyped up as a Real Big Deal, and then vanishes for a good chunk of the movie while everyone just kinda forgets about him. Things tighten up a bit towards the end once the action starts, though.

The plot didn't feel as cramped as I was worried about, because the Motorball stuff gets integrated in fairly early on, but also left in in such a way that a hypothetical sequel could focus on it.

Two iconic scenes from the manga did make it in, making my inner fanboy very happy.

Overall, I'd give it a 7. I don't regret watching it, and it's a decent action movie with some interesting characters and cool action scenes, but it really needed a tighter script.

So... is it worth theater prices, or would you wait for Netflix?

Overall, yes. It's flawed, but I think the worldbuilding and action scenes carry it over the humps.

Thanks! I guess I need to book my ticket!

It’s been a long time since I saw the manga and the one little shot I really remember from that didn’t make it in.

Just got back from watching this. Pretty good! If i had to rank it best movie ever/worst movie ever it would be above the 50% into best. Dialog is clunky and heavy handed in a few spots, but the plot moves along well and the actions good and VERY brutal. I would say this is the best live action adaptation of an anime thus far (not that that bar is set very high). Do recommend.

Never even heard of the manga. I was interested from the trailers and actually love the eyes.

I thought it was Amazing. I know my wife probably would say it was stupid. I liked it better than any of the recent Marvel movies.
I put it up there with Tangled but with action.

So best movie I saw in a good year. I hope some Marvel movie will be as good this year


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh....I wasn't thrilled with the ending...but I guess there can be a prequel/sequel if they want to.

If you have watched the original Manga production, or read the manga itself the eyes show they paid attention she has prepositionaly the biggest eyes of all the characters and it matches well. They have compacted the Hugo and motoball stories, because otherwise the next movie would just be motoball which is why there's a slight jump at the end. And the sword appearing abit earlier so we didn't see the water bomb trick (berserker +water=steam them plasma then free radicals add spark and boom perfect hydrogen oxygen explosion.
They have set up the next storyline s nicely. The actually did the face thing! And just as brutally as on paper.

Saw it last night.

Now for context I started reading the manga in the 90s, first in English, then Japanese. Loved it.

Somehow I stayed with the sequel Last Order through 19 (!!!) books of karate chopping robots making philosophy speeches.

Against my better judgement I picked up the three-quil Mars Chronicles (Alita the toddler years! I'm not making this up) and it's actually really good.

So let's just say I'm a fan.

The movie was...

OK.

Made me want to reread the original manga.

Too much stuff for one movie, the flash backs, motor ball and Nova could have been dropped and nothing lost.

Long time fan of the manga here!

Saw the movie yesterday and enjoyed it quite a bit. The story could have been streamlined some more; but to my suprise I liked the inclusion of Chyren and folding the Hugo and Motorball storylines together. I didn't like Novas portrail on the other hand; unnecessarily convoluted the story and was not faithful to the source material.

For those who don't know the 90ies manga, go pick it up. It's amazing and has some Necormunda vibes to it.

Just came back from Alita.

If you like sci fi, you’ll almost certainly enjoy this movie.

I watched this on Friday, with my wife that doesn’t like anime.

She liked it. I told her that was ridiculous as the movie checks off about 20 boxes of cliche anime tropes. She shrugged and said she liked it in live action. I shrugged and said it was one of the *most* cliche anime-type movies I’ve ever seen, not that I’ve seen a lot, but I’ve seen a few. I find that more tolerable in animated format for some reason.

It was good enough for a popcorn movie. I think my kids will like it when they see it, because robots smashing robots is good times in their books. And the cliche-ness isn’t cliche to them because they don’t have the years of experience with the tropes.

 greatbigtree wrote:
I watched this on Friday, with my wife that doesn’t like anime.

She liked it. I told her that was ridiculous as the movie checks off about 20 boxes of cliche anime tropes. She shrugged and said she liked it in live action. I shrugged and said it was one of the *most* cliche anime-type movies I’ve ever seen, not that I’ve seen a lot, but I’ve seen a few. I find that more tolerable in animated format for some reason.

It was good enough for a popcorn movie. I think my kids will like it when they see it, because robots smashing robots is good times in their books. And the cliche-ness isn’t cliche to them because they don’t have the years of experience with the tropes.

But it had none of animes WORST tropes. Like it had no long drawn out speeches about pseudo intellectual nonsense. The bad guys weren't justifying their actions with the same kinds of speeches.

I don't know... the entire movie was predictable to me. So whether or not the tropes were the worst, or the best, they were no surprises to me.

Since I don't know the origin of the story, maybe it was an "original" that others became inspired by that gave birth to the tropes. But *every* plot development was seen 10 minutes before it happened. I don't remember anything that wasn't blatantly foreshadowed...



or didn't otherwise turn out exactly as I'd expected it would. Like I said, maybe it's the original that others followed but it felt like a colour-by-the-numbers movie for me. Almost like they had a chart of Anime clichés and they rolled some dice to determine what order to put them in.

Not a bad movie, I sound more negatively critical than I feel. It just fell well short of a "great" movie, for me.

I very much doubt it's the original of anything. But I feel like the westernization of a lot of the story telling made the anime plot points significantly more tolerable to watch. Yes. It was all very predictable with the main character being a teen who is secretly the best and has all the best things and can do all the best things.

Welcome to every anime ever made. Dragonball? Secretly the best aliens in the galaxy with the highest potential for power but also the MOST powerful of the aliens with techniques nobody else can do. Just pick an anime and the main character is most likely some kind of kid who has all the best things. People LOVE Attack on Titan. A show about a kid who wants to fight titans but secretly can turn INTO a titan to fight the titans and is the best and has all the things.

You can't faithfully adapt an anime without bringing SOME of their bull gak along for the ride.