Alita: Battle Angel gets the Honest Trailers treatment in a new video. Hollywood, to put it mildly, doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to turning anime and/or manga properties into live-action films, as evidenced by the unflattering responses to recent adaptations like Paramount’s Ghost in the Shell and Netflix’s Death Note alone. And while the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer certainly has its fans, many would argue that this year’s Alita: Battle Angel was the first such manga adaptation that could truly be considered a success.
James Cameron had originally intended to direct Alita himself, but he ultimately handed the project over to Robert Rodriguez in order to focus his attention fully on his Avatar sequels. The Rodriguez-helmed Alita finally hit theaters this past February (following a few release date delays), and ended up earning pretty decent reviews, all things considered. But of course, critics and general audiences definitely had some complaints about the film, as its Honest Trailer points out.
Screen Junkies’ Alita: Battle Angel Honest Trailer is now online, following the film’s recent release in multiple home viewing formats. You can check it out in the space below.
As much as the Alita Honest Trailer pokes fun at things like Alita’s behavior and the elements of the film (namely, its motorball sequence) that feel oddly reminiscent of ’90s pop culture, it also takes the time to highlight the movie’s visually spectacular robot battles and familiar, but still fascinating cyberpunk themes. At the same time, however, it mocks the movie’s attempts to set the stage for a live-action Alita franchise by essentially having Alita (Rosa Salazar) speak in exposition or ask plot and/or world-building related questions for much of the runtime. And like many a critic before it, the trailer also points out that Alita doesn’t have a proper ending so much as it just stops and leaves it to a sequel to bring some actual closure to its story.
Speaking of which: Salazar’s gone on record as saying that she “would love” to make another Alita film, and it’s known that Cameron and Rodriguez have already mapped out where the plot would go in the next movie. Unfortunately, although Alita made enough at the global box office to cover its $170 million budget and turn a profit, it wasn’t a large enough hit to get Fox to immediately green-light the followup. Moreover, now that Disney owns Fox’s entertainment assets, it falls to the Mouse House to decide whether another Alita movie is worth making - and, at the moment, they seem uninterested. So much for that evil Edward Norton vs. Alita match that audiences were promised…
Source: Screen Junkies
