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domino harvey wrote:Alita: Battle Angel

That is looking as if it will be pretty faithful to the early 90s anime, even down to the Big Eyed protagonist! Although her love interest looks as if he will be a bit older than the cheeky rapscallion of the anime! (The anime was also what came strongly to mind as having influenced that literally stratified society in the Matt Damon sci-fi film from a few years back, Elysium. It is also interesting on watching through the credits of the anime that Rintaro is credited as a "Supervisor" on Battle Angel Alita, as the dangling climax of his 2001 film Metropolis feels very heavily influenced by the tragic finale here)

I have been following Battle Angel Alita for quite some time. I was happy with Cameron's decision to produce vs. direct, as I've found his work becoming increasingly disappointing over the years.
Rodriguez was an interesting choice to direct. This seems like material right up his alley, but he's not had a decent movie in a decade. This could be the one to bring him out of his slump, though.
The cast they've assembled for this is amazing! Jennifer Connelly, Cristoph Walz, Jackie Earle Haley, and Mahershala Ali, amongst others. And, the trailer does look like it will remain faithful to the anime.
There's so much I like about this film, I feel bad for saying this, but... the "Big Eyed protagonist" CGI is very distracting. I had to watch the trailer three times and force myself to not look at Alita's face in order to see anything else. The rest of the CGI seemed fine.
Anyone else find her big eyes distracting?

I tried mocking this on Twitter and was attacked by anime and manga fans. I would not wish this on any living being.

I spend my life aspiring towards being mocked by anime and manga fans, but I also spend my life aspiring to not use Twitter, so I'm conflicted.

I think it looks far better than I'd have expected frankly any Rodriguez movie to look these days.

What the hell were they thinking. Hate to think of what plastic surgery this is going to inspire.

The eyes are nowhere near large enough. A good rule of thumb is that they should be about as big as the character's fists, or it's not "cute" enough.

Gregory wrote:The eyes are nowhere near large enough. A good rule of thumb is that they should be about as big as the character's fists, or it's not "cute" enough.

Even minor digital changes to real human proportions look far more extreme than what you get away with in a drawing. If they make the eyes as large as in a manga or anime, on an actual human head it ends up looking freakishly grotesque rather than cute. Real heads also aren’t of the size and shape to accommodate eyes that huge. They are already pushing it here.

I know, I was being ironic about it.

Real heads also aren’t of the size and shape to accommodate eyes that huge.

It's already not a real head, and it already looks freakish.

Most of the comments I saw on twitter were critical of the eyes. I think the eyes look fine and I like a lot of the production design in the film.

When mom lets you pick your own outfit for picture day

Who else HATES the idea of "character posters"? Just a bunch of bored-looking actors posing in front of a blank backdrop is supposed to make people WANT to see a movie, especially an adaptation of a manga that 95% of the American audience will have not read? Gimme the days of the great ILLUSTRATED action-movie posters.

These can be classy sometimes, but I doubt they are to be remember except for instant marketing. In this case, I guess it seems even more pointless because you can't tell what the movie is about at all. For all we see here, it could be about a fashionable trader.

I would assume that posters focusing on a single character are meant more for the purpose of being passed by on the street (perhaps on the street outside a movie theatre), so that you see one character poster, then another, rather than stand up individually.

That would the kind of context I'd suppose too. I don't think they should be seen as any memorable visual key art for a movie, but rather as disposable instant marketing to try and occupy as many spaces as possible by multipying the posters.

They make sense for movies like the Avengers, where the characters are well-known and how they actually look is anticipated on its own terms. The first ones I remember seeing were for BATMAN FOREVER, and those seemed cool at the time.

Whether or not they’re well-executed is a different matter. This one just looks bad, but I doubt these Alita posters are being mass-produced for actual theatrical display - they’re probably online only with maybe a few for sale at online stores.

domino harvey wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 4:17 pm

Mahershala Ali wrote:When you were partying, I studied the trade

Just wanted to highlight how good this post is.

More on the point though some early preview comments from folks say that the movie is actually not an atrocity.

Wikipedia says that

Spoiler

Edward Norton

has an uncredited minor/supporting role in this as a major antagonist

I was wondering what he’s been up to

Never Cursed wrote: Thu Feb 14, 2019 7:53 pm Wikipedia says that

Spoiler

Edward Norton

has an uncredited minor/supporting role in this as a major antagonist

Ah, so that's who that was. I could tell by the way he was revealed that I was supposed to recognize him, but I didn't.

Anyone else see this yet? I thought it was pretty decent, and especially that it had a highly rare quality of feeling longer than it was but in a good way. There's a lot of story packed into here, but Rodriguez manages the story very well, and looking back I really appreciate how much he was able to cram into a 122-minute runtime without it feeling overstuffed or unwieldy or even particularly hurried in its pacing.

I also think it's amusing that nearly 20 years after Spielberg's A.I., still no one has matched that film's special effects when it comes to putting human faces on robot bodies.

But I'm having trouble stirring up any thoughts beyond that, and frankly I tend to think the discussion here tends to be a lot better than I find from mainstream criticism these days.

I gave this a watch over the weekend.

Whatever this movie did... it worked. It's highly enjoyable for what it is. For me it worked because of the simple fact that the film is just showing off how great the digital effects are specifically with its recreations of facial expressions and subtle details in the face movements.

Storywise it's just "a movie". Nothing bad or really even boring but definitely secondary. The last 15 or so minutes is very rushed and there was a major missed opportunity to go off of a "what is it to be human"-like theme then again neither Rodriguez and more importantly Cameron have ever been concerned with anything but spectacle so it's not a major detriment here at all.

However thinking back to T2 where Cameron developed the bond between John Connor and the T-800 I had to read up on how Rodriguez condensed Cameron's script and was approved by him before production so maybe his original work was more exploratory of that theme but leave it up to Rodriguez to "cut the fat". He ten minute whatever schooled the shit out of the script.

I was hoping to like this, but largely found myself bored. Cameron’s writing is really clunky, and Rodriguez doesn’t seem as at home with a mega production as he does with his scrappy lo-fi B-movie roots. There are a few impressive effects, but the dialogue sounds too painfully awkward and I’ve seen most of the action and FX before. Rodriguez did a much more exciting job translating comics to film with Sin City; this had none of the dynamism of reading manga (I’m not familiar with this particular title, so I can’t comment on how accurate it is.).