The film Alita: Battle Angel is based off a manga comic book series of a similar name.
For me, the
most impressive aspect of the movie was its attempt to world-build a future
cyberpunk dystopian manga world. Overall
though, I was kinda indifferent to the movie as a whole. It had reasonable looking CGI and fine action
scenes. But, there was this feeling I
had, while watching, that something was off.
There was too much going on and the motivations didn’t seem clear to me. There was a love story, an x-wife sub-plot, a roller ball tournament and other things that felt crammed
in. I honestly couldn’t figure out if the
movie was a story about cyber girl Alita and her mysterious past, or, was about
the boy, Yugo, who wanted to leave town to go to the hovering city named Zalem, or,
was it really about any other other plot threads in the movie. Too much stuff and not a lot of breathing
room was my feeling.
After viewing the movie I decided to read the actual manga comic itself. And, to no real surprise, the movie really was, as I feared, a Frankenstein creation of ideas, stealing plot lines, moments, and characters from all over the ENTIRE comic series. The movie makers, for some reason, had decided to shove everything they could in it and force it all to work somehow. Why? I don’t know. But in my opinion, it was a mistake.
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Alita, she
knows the karate and how to roller ball too
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After viewing the movie I decided to read the actual manga comic itself. And, to no real surprise, the movie really was, as I feared, a Frankenstein creation of ideas, stealing plot lines, moments, and characters from all over the ENTIRE comic series. The movie makers, for some reason, had decided to shove everything they could in it and force it all to work somehow. Why? I don’t know. But in my opinion, it was a mistake.
The first volume
(or the first storyline of the manga comics) consisted only about Alita being “reborn”
after being discovered in a scrap yard and then becoming a hunter-warrior and then
having to deal with a giant brain-eating cyborg
named Makaku. There was no boy named Yugo
or a roller ball arena or an evil ex-wife
or anything else. Makaku in the movie
was treated as a secondary character, whereas
in the comic book is a major threat to Alita.
The reader also learns more clearly what is going on with the hunter-warrior caste and what they really are
about.
The comic
explains that in the Scrapyard (the city in which the story takes place) there
is no formal police force and that the Factory (the government of the city)
puts out bounties on criminals. The hunter-warriors are registered citizens with
the Factory, who are allowed to go out and collect bounties to receive a monetary
reward. In the movie, the hunter-warriors’ relationship with the city and
to Zalem wasn’t at all clear. I got the impression from the movie that the
hunter-warriors hunted outlaw cyborgs called demons. But really, they just track down and kill
criminals, cyborgs or non-cyborgs, for money.
That’s how the city administrates “law and order” in Scrapyard.
I really think
the movie would’ve been better if it had stuck to the first manga storyline and
had not added in so much material from the rest of the series. You could really tell, watching, there was too
much going on and not all of it gelled together smoothly. It was messy.
I would’ve been more satisfied with a simpler story focusing on only Atila,
how the city works, her being a hunter-warrior,
and having the conflict and then final showdown
with the giant cyborg Makaku in the climax.
In the comics, Alita gets to explore the city’s underground more and she
learns more about it and learns what Makaku’s background was. Almost all of that was cut from the film (to
save room I imagine).
As for the
boy and the roller ball elements in the film, they do, in fact, show up in the
manga comics eventually, but much later and under different contexts. The other elements were completely separate storylines of their own, and, possibly,
could’ve been their own movies if there had been any sequels. But I doubt there ever will be a sequel to
Alita: Battle Angel, now.
I do understand
that it is difficult to translate manga for an American audience and still have
it be successful. A lot of the things from
the comics admittedly should be changed,
or at least tweaked some. However, this latest
attempt fell short not for those reasons, but for the initial bad idea in the scriptwriting process to mash up and force way too
many elements into the film. It really
did hurt it and I don’t think there was a good reason to. I wanted to like this movie.
I give this movie a C-.
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