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Alita definitely feels like a Robert Rodriguez movie, but it's from a Robert Rodriguez who made the film in the way he thought Cameron would, if that makes sense. It's not a typical Robert Rodriguez joint, but it for sure has the trappings of one. Like a fusion of styles.
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Feb 23, 2019 00:20
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Robert Rodriguez has straight up said he was trying to make a James Cameron movie.
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Feb 23, 2019 00:35
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CAR CRASH CRACKERS posted:Robert Rodriguez has straight up said he was trying to make a James Cameron movie. Well there we go. I looked up the old CineD thread for Alita that got archived, and I wrote pretty much the same thing when the first teaser dropped. quote:Whether or not they tweak the eyes a bit more, I just like that the overall look of the film and tone (from the trailer) doesn't really feel like typical RR. Although I kinda had the same impression when the first trailer for MoS came out; I thought that the look and tone didn't really feel like typical Snyder, as if he were stepping up his game since he revered the source material so much. Think the same can be said here. When it was announced RR was going to direct Alita, I was super apprehensive. But now, I feel like he's trying to make the film in the way Cameron would have, but in his own way too of course, and that's cool. It's also fun reading everyone's initial reaction to the eyes. Here's the thread if you have archives on your account: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3843095
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Feb 23, 2019 00:41
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i watched it again last night (on a different screen since apparently that one particular screen has awful audio) and tried to pay attention to Alita's face and the score most of all. The score still didn't wow me although it was definitely more noticeable, especially the motorball stuff, which was a highlight, but man, watching Alita's face the whole time really gives you a sense of how much work they put into her, effects-wise. There are moments when she's entirely surrounded by stuff that isn't real (like when she's in the spaceship that contains the Berserker) that feel like a cartoon a little bit but the moments directly before and after that there's a lot of interaction with other people (the trip outside with Hugo and his friends, talking with Ito about the suit) and she feels very human. There were times (especially post-new body when she interacted with Hugo and he had finally fallen for her) that I wouldn't believe that there wasn't someone there with him, especially the kiss and the lead-up to it. I also came away with a bit more sympathy for Hugo on a second viewing. I think if they had an extra 20 minutes to spare most of it could have been used really fleshing out his origins (I haven't read the manga but I read a synopsis about his story and the stuff with his brother would definitely add some weight to his dream to escape) and then maybe just 5 minutes with Hugo dealing with his new body and the revelation that "going to Zalem" isn't really a thing would have made that last attempt at an ascent even more heartbreaking. LORD OF BOOTY posted:I mean, I dunno, I felt like a lot of the characterization was straight out of Aliens or T2, but with a couple attributes swapped here and there. Like, Alita might as well be a gender-swapped John Connor or an older Newt, just with a better performer holding the reins in either case, and Ido comes off like if Connor's step-parents gave a drat. Zapan was Hudson with actual bravado and not just faked confidence. It's even got the same Cameron hallmark of having a shitzillion bizarrely well-sketched characters (McTeague, Hugo's friends, Chiren, honestly arguably even Vector) that aren't actually all that important to the narrative (anyone remember Where's Wierzbowski?). I imagine the most important things that RR brought to the movie are likely the latin setting (even if Cameron was the one who originally came up with the idea for the move Rodriguez definitely has a much bigger affinity for latin culture and a lot of the little things in the set dressing were probably him) and the casting of so many hispanic actors, especially Rosa Salazar (I am aware that "3" is not exactly "so many" but in a big huge blockbuster that isn't explicitly aimed at that crowd, it is. Thanks, Hollywood!!!) Obviously the fact that Iron City is the only place where people really seem to live gives a good excuse for the sort of "One of Everything Plus Some White People" casting that most blockbusters get but I would be willing to bet money that Cameron probably would have cast colorblind and Rodriguez probably has a good handle on up and coming young latinx stars and pushed to cast one of them as the lead. CAR CRASH CRACKERS posted:Robert Rodriguez has straight up said he was trying to make a James Cameron movie. See also: the original live-action Transformers movie, which was Michael Bay trying to make a Stephen Spielberg movie which Spielberg very much shepherded along due to being a fan of the source material. (also in this category: Man of Steel, which like teagone mentioned, was Snyder channelling Chris Nolan, and Super-8, which was Abrams taking his shot at making a Spielberg) DC Murderverse fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Feb 23, 2019 |
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Feb 23, 2019 00:42
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In the Japanese release is she named Gally?
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Feb 23, 2019 01:12
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So since I liked the movie I started reading the manga and holy poo poo this is so good, why haven't I discovered this wonderful gem until now. God drat it's so pretty and so loving cool.
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Feb 23, 2019 01:32
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NmareBfly posted:In the Japanese release is she named Gally? Nope. The movie is titled Alita: Battle Angel in Japan as well, not Gunnm. https://comicbook.com/anime/2018/01/10/alita-battle-angel-japanese-trailer-new-title/
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Feb 23, 2019 01:53
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NmareBfly posted:In the Japanese release is she named Gally? nm, misread edit "Gallyta"
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Feb 23, 2019 01:56
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Japanese trailer is dope. "Arita: Batteru Anjyeru" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD6GgaIrjBM BeanpolePeckerwood fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Feb 23, 2019 |
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Feb 23, 2019 02:02
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It's not just the Holkenburg score, I think Alita is the first film since Fury Road came out to successfully apply some of the lessons that film exemplified. There's a ton of Fury Road DNA in Alita, and that kind of thematic focus stands in stark contrast to the Cameron approach. So, until Cameron proves us wrong I'm gonna maintain that RR made a better film than Cameron would've.
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Feb 23, 2019 02:07
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Hah, I actually ended up watching Fury Road after I saw Alita in the theater. Fury Road and Alita definitely scratch the same itch for me.
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Feb 23, 2019 02:21
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teagone posted:Hah, I actually ended up watching Fury Road after I saw Alita in the theater. Fury Road and Alita definitely scratch the same itch for me. We were all waiting around after Fury Road released to see if it would have this big impact on the industry and change up the ways in which the action genre handled itself going forward...and the result was that actually Fury Road was the exception, and nearly everyone just went back to the same old way of doing things after 2015. It's nice to see that Alita was paying attention.
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Feb 23, 2019 02:31
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DC Murderverse posted:Obviously the fact that Iron City is the only place where people really seem to live gives a good excuse for the sort of "One of Everything Plus Some White People" casting that most blockbusters get but I would be willing to bet money that Cameron probably would have cast colorblind and Rodriguez probably has a good handle on up and coming young latinx stars and pushed to cast one of them as the lead. Whether or not that would have been true everything I've seen says that Salazar absolutely killed it in the audition, and it really shows in her performance.
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Feb 23, 2019 03:16
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I'm going to be honest, I was a little bummed that the Sons of Anarchy song they used for the reveal trailer didn't get used at any point in this. It was oddly appropriate for Alita
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Feb 23, 2019 03:33
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I imagine Weta worked and worked on the eyes to the bitter end, eyes are probably the single most difficult thing to nail in cgi. Which makes it that more unfortunate that they had to have something in the earliest trailers. I'm still really impressed with how close they got and wonder how good it'd look at realistic proportions.
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Feb 23, 2019 07:25
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BeanpolePeckerwood posted:It's not just the Holkenburg score, I think Alita is the first film since Fury Road came out to successfully apply some of the lessons that film exemplified. i can't quite put my finger on why, but i felt exactly the same way driving home after seeing alita as i did right after seeing fury road for the first time the theater was less than a 1/4 full, this movie totally deserves better. i would dig a sequel
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Feb 23, 2019 08:22
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I haven't seen it posted yet, but the "cutting the tear in half" scene made me happy, because it's a reference to this Motorball CGI clip from the early 2000s.
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Feb 23, 2019 08:33
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:i can't quite put my finger on why, but i felt exactly the same way driving home after seeing alita as i did right after seeing fury road for the first time They are both no-win scenario future flicks with visually comprehensible action and non-traditional characters punching-up for a change!
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Feb 23, 2019 11:17
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Mecha posted:I haven't seen it posted yet, but the "cutting the tear in half" scene made me happy, because it's a reference to this Motorball CGI clip from the early 2000s. It's also in the manga!
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Feb 23, 2019 15:23
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I can't believe that like with Fury Road to everything in between, we're now going to go from the action and world building in this to another decade of Marvel movies.
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Feb 23, 2019 19:17
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Neo Rasa posted:I can't believe that like with Fury Road to everything in between, we're now going to go from the action and world building in this to another decade of Marvel movies. Right? Somehow, nobody looked at Fury Road or John Wick and thought "Hey let's do that!" Fucken idiot corn cob rear end flour as a spice no taste having rear end mother fuckers. <  >Gonna go see this gem again tomorrow after my buds get out of work.
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Feb 23, 2019 20:16
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Just got back home from watching it a second time. Some thoughts/observations: It's a bit of a quirky movie, with some odd pacing and a bit of a jumbled and compressed plot. I think it could benefit from being half an hour longer, and am looking forward to any potential director's cut. That said, I think it has all the makings of a cult classic. McTeague rules. Probably my favourite tertiary character from any film. In the giant bar fight he's just sitting there laughing and and having the time of his life. His entire reason to help out when Alita lose the first body Ido gives her being "He's not a dog person. I hate that!" is just  About the end I'm leaning towards the Chiren reveal at the end being a fake-out. That said, I do think Vector believes that really is Chiren. I'm thinking Nova secretly had a different brain placed in the box because he doesn't want to reveal the secret of Zalem yet. At the very end, that looks like a different body Alita is wearing. More mechanical looking than the berserker body, and it also doesn't look to have the separate protective pads that she wears in the tryouts. It looks like her motorball body from the manga, appropriately enough. So while motorball is introduced early, I think we very well might see the bulk of that arc in a potential sequel.
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Feb 23, 2019 20:34
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Apparently, the actress who played Screwhead, Elle LaMont, posted the makeup FX process they did on her, led by Sabrina Wilson at KNB. A lot of practical makeup was still involved with her character to make her face come off the cyborg body. https://www.facebook.com/ellelamont...42Qo8&__tn__=-R
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Feb 23, 2019 20:37
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Groetgaffel posted:At the very end, that looks like a different body Alita is wearing. More mechanical looking than the berserker body, and it also doesn't look to have the separate protective pads that she wears in the tryouts. It looks like her motorball body from the manga, appropriately enough. So while motorball is introduced early, I think we very well might see the bulk of that arc in a potential sequel. Yeah, it's definitely different. Presumably she doesn't want to risk the Berserker body in the arena.
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Feb 23, 2019 20:55
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Sir Kodiak posted:Yeah, it's definitely different. Presumably she doesn't want to risk the Berserker body in the arena. Now, in the manga she didn't know about Nova at this point. She just wanted to forget everything. She might end up doing something similar in a second movie, put aside everything that connects her to Ido and Hugo, focusing everything on moving forward to get to Nova.
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Feb 23, 2019 21:01
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if they have the sequel be all about Motorball, I would be down for the end of this movie effectively being in media res and we then get to watch an entire movie about her Motorball career
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Feb 23, 2019 22:23
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Yeah, it makes sense that a potential sequel would focus primarily on motorball because 1) Jai Courtney was cast as Jashugan, gotta get his storyline in, and 2) the film makes it a point that the motorball champion gets to enter Zalem, which progresses Alita's journey to get to Nova. I also posted a link to an interview back one page where James Cameron originally intended for a second film to feature motorball prominently when he was still developing the story.
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Feb 23, 2019 22:35
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Personally I think that a potential sequel might overlap a bit with this film. The one motorball match we see in the movie is a tryout for second league. Then there's a time skip of a few months according to the announcer guy, and now Alita is in her first match in the champions league. The sequel, I think, will either start with her fighting her way up through second league and assembling her challenge team for facing Jashugan, or have a flashback to those events. Also, after I saw the film the first time I went back to the manga. Am currently pretty far into Last Order. 1) Last Order would be hell to adapt into films, lacking as it does the very clear arcs with clean breaks that the original has. Might work well as tv series of some kind though. 2) Rakan the Indestructible Pervert is most certainly not suitable for a PG-13 adaptation.
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Feb 23, 2019 23:44
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teagone posted:It's also fun reading everyone's initial reaction to the eyes. Here's the thread if you have archives on your account: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3843095 where's my 'big eye defender' gang tag
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Feb 24, 2019 03:44
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Groetgaffel posted:2) Rakan the Indestructible Pervert is most certainly not suitable for a PG-13 adaptation. I mean... just take out the pervert attribute. "Guy who used to be basically Bruce Lee but went batshit from a brain injury" is a workable concept even if he doesn't rape people. e: for anyone reading who doesn't know the manga, rest easy; this character is the only time rape comes up in the manga at all that I'm aware, and it's played 100% for horror, with the character being treated as basically a complete reprehensible monster. Like, loving Nova is treated as a more sympathetic and better person than Rakan, if that says anything.
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Feb 24, 2019 03:46
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:I mean... just take out the pervert attribute. "Guy who used to be basically Bruce Lee but went batshit from a brain injury" is a workable concept even if he doesn't rape people. He's certainly not presented as a good guy but imo he was played for laughs more than once (loving holes in the wall, "I'm an anal virgin!", etc etc). Particularly after the original manga did such a great job of avoiding that kind of poo poo, it was a huge disappointment.
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Feb 24, 2019 04:01
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To be fair, he's not hurting anybody in the former instance, and the latter instance is him getting turbo-murdered. Like, the character has some funny bits, but when he's doing sexual violence, the manga's pretty blunt about that being awful.
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Feb 24, 2019 04:42
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I liked this movie! I think asking for a trilogy is optimistic but I’d enjoy a sequel with half focused on motor ball and half focused on finally confronting Nova.
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Feb 24, 2019 04:45
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Found this fun behind the scenes video on youtube. Spoilers obviously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=timN6rZJPDw
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Feb 24, 2019 04:58
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I just saw this movie and it’s a shame it’s not making more money. 
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Feb 24, 2019 05:19
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I just got into the manga last year, actually after hearing about the movie-- I told my partner the title sounded familiar and he said he read it forever ago and really liked it, so I ordered the first volume and was blown away. I also loved the movie. It was a bit messy in places as far as pacing, and of course there were general flaws (which I never feel like I can explain in detail because I'm just a casual moviegoer), but it never got to a point that I wasn't enjoying it. I really hope it does well enough for a sequel because I want more motorball and cool cyborg designs! (Hopefully some of which will be robot dogs, because obviously.)
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Feb 24, 2019 08:01
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Al Cu Ad Solte posted:Right? Somehow, nobody looked at Fury Road or John Wick and thought "Hey let's do that!" uh, Atomic Blonde? Hotel Artemis? John Wick definitely reverberated through the action movie industry, even if it didn't get to the biggest blockbusters
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Feb 24, 2019 08:14
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i went looking for pictures of Rosa Salazar and Cristin Milioti because I think Milioti looks so much like Alita that they should cast her as another one of those soliders and I learned that Rosa is 33 years old. my mind is loving blown. IRL she's 11 years older than Hugo. (edit: who is dating Sofia Boutella and i've never been more jealous of someone in my whole life) AllisonByProxy posted:Found this fun behind the scenes video on youtube. Spoilers obviously. Rosa and Ed Skrein are goddamn superheroes for filming entirely in those suits. They probably were my two favorite performances in the movie (although Cristoph is up there too) and they had those ugly grey skins on the entire time (and Rosa had her face all dotted up too) whenever I look at these I'm reminded of just how weird and schizophrenic the process of making a huge-budget blockbuster is. half of the stuff you're working with isn't real and it's a lot harder to determine exactly how your performance is gonna look and come across when everything is all done.
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Feb 24, 2019 08:34
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DC Murderverse posted:i went looking for pictures of Rosa Salazar and Cristin Milioti because I think Milioti looks so much like Alita that they should cast her as another one of those soliders and I learned that Rosa is 33 years old. Guess what, so's Cristin Milioti!
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Feb 24, 2019 09:07
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I enjoyed the movie. A sequel might be good but I felt that most of the fun was learning along w/ Alita who she was and what she was capable of. The bar scene was the absolute high point of the movie, and I loved 'Sam Elliot' and his cyborg puppies. The villain 'reveal' at the end gave me a hearty chuckle.
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Feb 24, 2019 09:33
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