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Monthly Movie Club Alita Battle Angel

Discussion in 'General Chat' started by Scalenex, Feb 11, 2019.

  1. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    Tommorow it is half price movie day at my local theater. I intend to watch Alita Battle Angel. This is my third and final attempt to spearhead semi-regular discussion of contemporary movies on this subforum.
     
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  2. NIGHTBRINGER
    Slann

    NIGHTBRINGER Second Spawning

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    But Endgame is just around the corner!


    You could also do Captain Marvel, but that will just devolve into me ripping into the identity politics surrounding the film (without actually watching it in the theater! #boycott)
     
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  3. Karnus
    Ripperdactil

    Karnus Well-Known Member

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    We could so also discuss the poor casting of the genie in the new Alladin
     
  4. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    I don't want a thread about movies I'm NOT going to watch (which includes Captain Marvel and Aladdin among other many others.) @NIGHTBRINGER can make a thread like that.
     
  5. NIGHTBRINGER
    Slann

    NIGHTBRINGER Second Spawning

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    That is fair enough.


    Endgame is a great candidate and it should be able to garner a healthy amount of discussion.
     
  6. Paradoxical Pacifism
    Skink Chief

    Paradoxical Pacifism Well-Known Member

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    what about Fury?



    pretty grim dark and historically inaccurate :p
     
  7. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    Enough is Enough.

    You can make all the threads you want, or tack something on to the one of Nightbringer's fairly random threads.

    This thread is for discussing Alita Battle Angel. No other movies should be mentioned here unless you are making a direct comparison.

    I have the power to delete off topic replies!
     
  8. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    Were it not half-priced movie night, I would have stayed in tonight. Weather was really nasty, but I am cheap and I do not like paying full price for movie tickets.

    Alita Battle Angel was a good movie. It's not a perfect movie. I doubt in ten years people will remember it but I enjoyed it tonight. It was worth the fifteen minutes it took to de-snow my car and the $6 the ticket cost me.

    What can I say, this movie is very James Cameron. You got a super powered heroine like Dark Angel. You have a dark futuristic cyborg story that examines what is or is not a human like Terminator. Package everything in stunning visual effects like Avatar and throw in a dash of a Titatanic love story.

    Robert Rodriguez did a lot on this two. The only thing he did that I am familar with is Sin City. Alita Battle Angel has less sex and gore than Sin City but both films are genre bending film noir and action. So you got film noir, action, sci-fi, and a coming of age story. If you like these things, you should like the movie.

    This movie is based off a Manga and it clearly draws on a lot of anime tropes. I do not know if anime fans would like this. I watch some anime but I don't consider myself a true anime fan. I am most eager to hear from anime fans what they think of this. I have two friends who like anime and are hard to please with live action movies. I don't know if I should recommend this to them.


    One thing that was not worth it was the "special feature" at the end. The special feature was James Cameron, Robert Rodriguez, and some of the actors and senior staff they worked with patting each other on the back. It made me want to shout at the screen. "You made a popcorn movie, not the twenty-first century's Citizen Kane!"

    They were so pretentious it lessened my enjoyment of the movie. One problem with James Cameron is he is not known for subtlety. Over and over again, the panel talking about the movie kept talking about Alita's wide eyed innocence. Her wide eyed naivte. They were very proud of themselves for making Alita literally wide-eyed.

    That was one thing that bugged me. It wasn't just the wide-eyed protagonist. Very frequently the movie took a figure of speech and made it literal. They didn't make a pun out "this cost me an arm and leg!" but almost every other body part based figure of speech had a literal representation somewhere.

    This isn't the first sci-fi movie that uses this trope, but the upper classes are literally towering above the lower classes. The metaphor for a corrupt military industrial/media complex impeding social mobility was not subtle. I happen to have some resentment towards wealthy people leaning on the political system, but James Cameron really likes to dump on the rich. It was especially obvious in Titanic, Avatar, and of course Alita Battle Angel.

    Like I said, this movie is very James Cameron.

    But James Cameron is a good storyteller at his core. Cameron is not Michael Bay who cannot tell a story to save his life. His stories are simple (Avatar's story was "military bad, trees good," but the acting, special effects, cinematography, and music was all on point.

    This is better than Avatar in terms of nuance. At least you have a good coming of age story. Alita starts the film as a cybernetic girl and ends the film as a cybernetic woman.

    This is an action movie more than it is a coming of age story, but in my opinion an action movie fails if you don't care about the characters no matter how many explosions (are you reading this Michael Bay!). I cared about these characters, so I cared about the results of the action scenes.


    I can spew more, but i want to give someone else a chance to write something. I guess the movie is only in limited release stage now. It officially debuts on Valentines Day. Not exactly my idea of a date movie. It has a love story in it, but I would say that is the B-plot at best, if not the C-plot.
     
  9. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    This was a post-apocalyptic setting. There was a variety of races and nationalities. Lots of different languages were spoken, but real world ethnic divisions were not really a factor in this movie. There was class divisions. The poor people lived on the ground and the rich people lived in the sky. Beyond that, the main source of fantastical racism was between flesh people and cyborgs. It was difficult to tell which one was supposed to be the oppressed minority, it kept switching scene to scene which group was dominant and which group was oppressed. It felt like competing tribes more than a dichotomy of first class and second class citizens. There were parts of town where cyborgs were large and in charge and there were parts of town where cyborgs were unwelcome. That's actually pretty realistic.


    I’m going to talk about Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron. They both put their imprint on this movie. Rodriguez was a driving force behind the Spy Kids franchise but apart from that, the vast majority of his work is dark.

    James Cameron did do the first two Terminator movies but he is best known for uplifting visuals. He will probably be in the history books for Avatar.

    The two complimented each other on Alita Battle Angel for the visual effects. The scenery nearly always displayed the visual aesthetics of both being a juxtaposition of beautiful and ugly in almost every scene. The choreography was excellent and the sci-fi steam punk weapons were excellent. In this case these two created something more than the sum of their parts.


    The rich people who lived in the sky wouldn't let the poor people on the ground have guns as a means of control. That is the major argument of second amendment advocates, that gun control is a means of subjugation. This was only mentioned once. The movie COULD have gone political with the gun control debate but chose not to. This was probably wise.

    They certainly could have weapons. They had rocket powered hammers and electric swords, and steel claws and grasping metal tenatcles. It's not really important why there are no guns because it is very clear why: Because hybrids of medieval and futuristic weapons are awesome.


    There was one aspect of the move where Rodriguez and Cameron worked at cross purposes. Cameron likes clear good guys and clear bad guys. He makes both his male and female heroes have a dash of rebellious “bad boy” traits but their “bad” traits are pretty harmless.

    Rodriguez tends to have morally dark anti-heroes fighting REALLY bad villains that would never be allowed in a PG-13 movie. I could go into the minor issues where an R rated villain's round peg was forced into a PG-13 square hole, but that's hard to do without a major spoiler so I'll wait for more people to tell me they watched the movie to write about that.

    Now Alita was appropriately called an angel and her surrogate father, Dr. Dyson was near saint-like. Their bad boy/bad girl traits were mostly cosmetic. Within the limits of a PG-13 movie, Alita Battle Angel had heroes, anti-heroes, and villains.

    Because James Cameron does not believe in subtlety it was not the audience’s job to figure out who was good and who was evil, we were told this by the movie and cinematography. My problem is that the anti-heroes were not sufficiently differentiated from the villains.

    The major plot driver of this movie is that criminals would often steal cyborgs body parts and sell the parts.

    I view forcible amputation as nightmare fuel. Ever since I had to a college research project on the Lord’s Resistance Army, the thought of forcible amputation as terrifying. Now I granted that if a cyborg leg is removed it is possible to get a new cyborg leg, and it is not possible to replace a flesh and bone leg, but the theft of a cybernetic body part is still stomach churning to me. Most of the body part theft occurred off camera but a little bit of it was on camera and it was gross.

    Both the movies villains and the movie’s anti-villains trafficked in cybernetic parts. The emotional tone of the movie liked it to violent rape when the villains stole body parts and the movie likened it to stealing car tires when the anti-heroes practiced this.

    This bothered me. Chiren and Hugo seem to get a free pass for stealing body parts because they are the love interests of Dr. Dysen and Hugo respectively. To their credit, the movie villains killed their victims, and the anti-heroes left their victims alive. Still it is not much better than murder to leave someone in a bad neighborhood with no arms and no legs.

    I like stories based on redemption, but in my opinion trafficking in stolen body parts Extis beyond redemption. At the very least you cannot redeem yourself by being nice to Alita.

    Though maybe you can maybe earn redemption by winning the Scalenex Cup. Both Chiren and Hugo had very unpleasant ends. Especially Chiren who would fall into the fate-worse-than-death camp.

    I really didn’t like the Hugo-Alita love story. Alita was technically 300 years old, but she acted fourteen-ish and that made the age difference between her and Hugo creepy. Also, because Hugo trafficked in stolen cybernetic parts, Hugo examining her robot arms was both creepy for sexual and non-sexual reasons. Yerch.

    Now I'll wait for at least one other person to make commentary on the movie before writing something else.
     
    Last edited: Feb 17, 2019
  10. Killer Angel
    Slann

    Killer Angel Prophet of the Stars Staff Member

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    I'm eagerly wait for it in my theatre.
    Then I'll comment.
     
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  11. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    I'm waiting.

    I JUST WANT TO TALK ABOUT ONE MOVIE THAT ISN'T PART OF A GIANT MEGA-FRANCHISE! IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?

    :(:banghead::argh:
     
    Last edited: Feb 25, 2019
  12. Killer Angel
    Slann

    Killer Angel Prophet of the Stars Staff Member

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    I don't live in a big city.
    It will arrive, hopefully soon.
     
  13. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    Opening night for Captain Marvel is Friday. I see there is an Internet movement to watch Alita Battle Angel instead this Friday. I doubt that boycott will be notice, but you watch Alita anyway, then comment about it.

    It's a good movie, I swear!
     
  14. GreenyRepublic
    Temple Guard

    GreenyRepublic Well-Known Member

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    I err... Well, I'll try to keep it brief, but Alita failed to make any kind of impression on me - it's not that I actively despised it with every fibre of my being, but good god it got dull quickly, and I left the cinema feeling like there was a two-and-a-half-hour void in my memory. There were a few hooks that I thought could have been interesting plotlines (the professor guy losing his daughter being one) but they were never explored so much as mentioned as existing before we moved onto the next action scene. The love arc was just cringeworthy, no small thanks to Keean Johnson's atrocious acting (the 'most human person I've met' line had me wincing) and could have been ditched in favour or developing basically any other part of the story, or extending the ridiculously rushed introduction and giving us some much-needed backstory and character-building in the process. By the end of the film I was wondering why any of the big fights or events mattered, or what the stakes were, or who that big evil guy was exactly and why he was supposed to be important, but above everything else I was just bored of it all.

    Just so I don't sound like a grumpy cynic I'll say some nice things: Rosa Salazar put in a really good performance (making me wish even more that we'd had longer with her in the early stages of the film before things kicked off), the visuals were outstanding, and the action sequences were pretty entertaining. Ed Skrein's character was a pretty fun comic relief villain, bringing that magnificent smugness we've come to know and love him for.

    So err yeah, there's my two cents. It really felt like a wasted opportunity to me, which sucks because I liked the look of it.
     
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  15. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    I disagree with this, but I agree with almost everything else you said.

    Agreed, this could have been built up a little more. I think we could have seen more of all the supporting characters' stories, except Keann Johnson's character...

    I too found the love arc cringy. The line I think was a really lame line, and I think maybe it was supposed to be lame. That kind of over the top insincere compliment is a good example of the pick up skills of teenaged boys. It was a testament to Alita's naivete that she fell for it.

    I will note that I saw a video made by a fan of the manga describing his hopes and fears for the movie (he put his video up BEFORE the movie came out) and he mentioned that Alita's first love interest was awkward and was a bad match but people that young don't know any better. Apparently in the manga, when Alita gets older and wiser, her second love interest has a more genuine bond and the two have a much healthier relationship.

    I kind of agree there. At the middle of the movie, Alita fought several hard battles where she was literally fighting for her life. The supposed climax of the movie was pretty anti-climatic because she was avenging her dead boyfriend she was never that close to, and her surrogate father's ex-wife who she was even less close to.

    He was the figurehead for the corrupt and oppressive system. Not exactly nuanced. That is a weakness of both James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez.

    Agreed.

    Was he the cyborg who was really proud of his handsome face or was he was the cyborg that was basically a big bulky Jack the Ripper type? I liked the former but found his fate rather predictable (like much of the movie). The big Jack the Ripper guy, I think he had villain decay because Alita fought him three times. By the third time they fought I was not remotely concerned. To be fair the third fight was the only time Alita fought him without backup but by that point her systems have been upgraded.

    I could talk more about the villains, both the parts I liked and the parts I don't, but I am overdue to sleep, so I will pick up on this later, hopefully after someone else writes something about this excellent, albeit flawed, movie.

    In some ways this movie is the perfect movie for me to spew about because it has lots of good things in and lots of bad things. I cannot talk about The Dark Knight much because it is near perfect film. I cannot talk much about After Earth because it was a near perfect dumpster fire.
     
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  16. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    I'm going to necro my own movie article. First off, I think Alita is the best movie of 2019 and I don't get tired of talking about it but so few people have seen it. Most of my misgivings about Alita involve the PG 13 rating it has.

    Now I realize that the movie industry in general makes more money with different ratings but if all media catered to me and me alone there would only be G movies and R movies. I like child friendly adventures and I like really dark and gritty stories. When producers try to have it both ways it gets a little messy.

    Going back to Star Wars Revenge of the Sith, the first time I saw it was with my mom and my mom giggled and mocked it when they talked about Anakin killing younglings. That just sounds weird, but they might have lost their rating if they said "Anakin murdered children" PG-13 rating. Our American rating system is so arbirtary tiny little adjustments can slide a movie into this rating or that movie. Alita split hairs all the time.

    The biggest is that Alita had really horrific violence in it but very little actual blood. That's a big thing with cyborgs that are barely human. Without getting into too many specifics, there was a lot of context. First off, I find stealing body parts utterly terrifying, even if they are cyborg. Usually, they just talked about it happening off camera. Sometimes the doctor character ran across victims who had thier limbs stolen. They only showed it person a few times but when they showed it in great detail I was horrified.

    Now some movies and TV shows let viwerers come to their own conclusions on moral issues but this is not usually the case. A competant director can use lighting, pacing, cinematography, music, and other cues to try to paint one evil act as justiable and another as reprehensible.

    Okay, a big part of the movie is that Alita has a good heart but starts out intiially naive and has to grow up fast. Because of her surrogate father moonlit as a bounty hunter motivated mainly by justice she attributed that to ALL bounty hunters. Turns out most of the post apocalytpic cyborg bounty hunters are money hungry adrenaline junkies, not righteous protectors of the weak. Who knew?

    So Alita tried ot get the bounty hunters to go after a horrible criminal for free. He was a serial killer. He stole body parts. It is implied but never stated that he is either a rapist or gets a sexual thrill out of murder because this villain had a Jack the Ripper preference for dismembering prostitutes. I mean this villain is as dark and evil as you can get in PG-13. And most of the bounty hunters wouldn't take him down for money. What is the event horizon that makes some of them turn and say "That's too far, this evil guy needs to die!"? The event is that he killed a dog (the camera cut away but it is clear what happened). I love dogs and I think people who abuse dogs are despicable but I think it's wrong the way they protrayed it.

    Tazing a law abiding citizen and stealing his arms and legs as he begs for mercy as a pattern of repeated behavior. That is something a character can easily redeem himself from. Kill a dog and you are Evil Incarnate. Granted this was killing a dog for pure spite after already having murdered dozens of men and women but it was the dog that was the event horizon.

    I'm also bugged by the redemption arcs of Hugo and Chiren. In my opinion they were only slightly less evil than the two main villains of the movie. But I guess this kind of fits the source material. I think Hugo and Chiren were polarizng characters in the manga too according to the one fan of the manga I watched a video of.

    Convuluted argument aside. Basically, if you want to make your protagonists gritty anti-heroes and your villains despicably evil, make the movie rated R, so you don't have to tie yourself into knots hiding this, downplaying that, or implying things.

    If you want to make a movie solely about a young girl's coming of age story in a sci-fi world, keep it light and make it rated G.
     
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  17. Aginor
    Slann

    Aginor Fifth Spawning Staff Member

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    Yeah there are plenty of movies that ride the thin line between the ratings.

    What I don't really agree with is that you should show it. Implying violence and not directly showing it is a technique that I kinda like.
    The mind of the person can fill the necessary bits in, and many movies use that as an artistic tool.

    At the same time I think the depicted violence often is for the sake of having it. Overdone, as a cheap eye catcher, to the point at which I am more annoyed by it than anything else. IMO Game of Thrones overdoes it for example, same for Spartacus to name just two extreme examples.

    Star Wars is the opposite. They show that you don't need splatter effects to make intense scenes.
    There are very little scenes with blood in them, only about one per movie. Star Wars is pretty violent, lots of people getting killed. But not overdone.

    EDIT: Clockwork Orange is even better. Man that is a violent movie. But they stylized big parts of it. That's a part of artistic quality to me.

    About the language though... a few trigger words and the rating is up. That's just weird. I am glad that's not the case in German. No bleeping out swear words either. Sure, in Disney movies nobody says "Fuck you" but that's about it.
     
  18. Scalenex
    Slann

    Scalenex Keeper of the Indexes Staff Member

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    As an artistic tool. I am all for implied violence. But in the case of Alita I think the implied violence versus shown violence was done for the wrong reasons.
     
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