I think “kind of a weak point” is way overselling the quality of the “romance.” Alita literally falls in love with the first boy she sees.
I see they based her off my own childhood.
He is super dreamy and boyband like though!
I think it’s mostly an artifact of trying to compress 3-4 different storylines into a two-hour movie.
In the comics, his story arc is the subject of the second out of 9 volumes (the film crams the first 3-4 volumes into the movie); basically, she’s already a fairly experienced hunter-killer by the time she meets him. For obvious reasons - they can’t wait that long before introducing the romantic interest in a 2-hour movie).
The plotline of the graphic novels sounds a lot better. But I disagree that there’s no way they could have held the relationship until later. There’s no reason they had to cram the entire falling-in-love storyline into this movie when they clearly are planning for sequels. Have her meet him later in the story and develop the relationship over two or even three movies.
Instead, she wakes up, goes outside, and falls in love within five or seven minutes. It’s total crap.
I’m not forgetting the defense mechanism. She jumps right over it unscathed in that same scene, so it’s difficult to take seriously as an impediment. (Though I guess it would probably be more of an issue as it gets more vertical.)
The difference is she’s an elite combat robot, using 300 year-old technology that is far more advanced than anything available to the society depicted the movie (and keep in mind - even with this advanced technology, the defenses still took out her entire unit of cyborg super-soldiers in the flashback scene).
@Menzo
I totally agree that it would have been a superior movie if they had taken their time with the world-building, and focused on the Ido-Alita relationship instead. But I kind of understand why they didn’t.
As mentioned, the Hugo romance is volume 2 or 9. Even if we assume they’re planning three movies, it wouldn’t really make sense to push that relationship into a second or third movie - he’s just not that “important”. Hugo is - essentially - Alita’s tragic “childhood sweetheart”. The experience shapes her (it makes her give up being a Hunter-Killer, for one, and push her into motorball), but it’s essentially just part of her growing up.
Worth noting that in the comics, the feelings in the relationship is essentially one-sided. She loves him. He doesn’t really love her - his only obsession is getting to Cloud City.
Well there is the slight technicality that climbing the elevators from the exterior won’t do them much good when they get on top, below their goal!
The romance is about as stupid in the movie as it is in the manga, although they have different flavours of silliness. Kishiro can sometimes write tragic characters (such as Zapan, Nova or Makaku/Grewishka — as they are not depicted in the movie, sadly), but the dude got zero sense for romantic intrigues whatsoever.
Man, this movie was such a mess despite the world-building. The only good thing I can see is the tropey characters you expected to die in a paint-by-the-numbers scifi movie… didn’t. It was really strange.
I watched this as part of a slew of movies I chewed through on a long flight over the Pacific. Didn’t care much for it… which isn’t surprising since I don’t generally like Rodriguez’s stuff.
I think that Christoph Waltz was acting like he was in a magna-based story where his character’s motivations and history kept fluctuating madly as the movie went on… and he mostly just seemed befuddled. Connelly seemed fine, though her character called for the emotional range of a turnip. Rosa Salazar seemed to do well - though I’m not sure how much of it was physical acting vs. voice acting.
I watched Atila the Hun yesterday. This was a pleasant surprise. I knew nothing going in. So I kind of discovered the movie and the universe through Atila’s huge eyes. She’s a person whose brain is human, but she’s been put into an artificial body. She doesn’t remember anything, so as she looks around this world, she figures stuff out, just like the audience.
I really liked the look and feel of the city. When Atila takes part in a futuristic combination of basketball and rollerblading, it is done in a really fun and well done sequence. Unfortunately, later when they show a “professional” game of this kind, instead of the street version, it doesn’t look grounded it all, it all looks like a big CGI video game.
Overall I enjoyed myself. I like that the story stayed grounded in that same world that is introduced. From the beginning Atila looks up at the city in the sky and says 'What holds that up? Magic". Apparently the answer is engineering. But I liked the fact that despite it playing a big role in the movie, we never get to see what’s up there. And the tale itself doesn’t grow too epic in that way either.
Incidentally, I also saw Bumblebee this weekend, so it was weird to see the young actor who plays the main character’s love interest in that movie also pop up in this movie, but in a very small role. That kid has potential.
One final note, I enjoyed the fact that in this movie, whenever I thought “oh that’s a bad move”, it usually ended up actually being a bad move. Like when Atilla pushes off a wall into a predictable trajectory towards the enemy. There’s not much she can do to dodge at that point. They made good use of slow motion throughout the movie to show complicated dodging and such so that the action looked nice and also very understandable.
Btw, the last reveal in the movie is a casting reveal. It’s not often that movies do that, kind of go for shocking the audience with a casting decision. It’s a 4th wall kind of thing to do, but I thought it worked well here. I was shocked.
I love that you misspelled her name every single time, and got the name of the movie wrong.
How you like the movie, though, is less understandable.
The beginning of the movie bought a lot of good will with me. I agree with all the criticisms in the thread, and like I said the later rollerball stuff was just bad. But it didn’t quite reverse the good feelings I got in the beginning as she discovered how things were in this world. There was even a moment where I thought this was going to be a murder mystery and we’d eventually find out who was murdering those women. Sadly, that was not to be.
I watched this last week, but I don’t get what you mean here. What did I miss?
The guy with the wild hair is not the usual actor we see in Hollywood with that wild hair.
Instead, Nova lowers his goggles and we see that it’s Edward Norton.
Oh I didn’t even recognize him. /shrug
We did, though? It just wasn’t the focus of the plot, in part because it’s like three story arcs of the manga stitched together. (I’ve only read one volume of the manga, but that’s what I’ve heard.)
Yeah, that’s what I meant, that it’s sadly not the focus of the plot. We found out pretty quickly who was murdering the women, and it wasn’t a big reveal like in a murder mystery, it was just a plot point in a bigger scheme.
I recently grabbed it from RedBox, myself. I thought it was great world building and just horrendous story telling. I was pleasantly surprised to not be put off by her eyes, however.
Not a bad way to put it. Clearly I can forgive a lot if there’s good visuals and world building, since I wouldn’t mind a sequel.