A Few Thoughts on the Alita Movie

A week into its American theatrical release, director Robert Rodriguez and writer/producer James Cameron’s Alita: Battle Angel live-action film opened with a $28.2 million dollar first weekend, placing it at the top of the box office. The film’s global gross totaled over $137 million with the movie not yet released in major markets China and Japan. With an estimated production budget of $170 million, and publicity costs nearly doubling the total investment, the movie seems to be on firm footing, but the viewer drop-off in the second week isn’t known yet.

Although advance critical reviews were positive with caveats, viewer response has seemingly been enthusiastic and highly positive. The movie currently holds an impressive 7.6 IMDB score, ranking it higher than fan-favorite movies including both John Wick films, Frozen, Wonder Woman, and Black Panther. Alita‘s IMDB score is only two-tenths of a point behind Avatar, the highest grossing movie of all time. Alita‘s Rotten Tomatoes audience ranking is an impressively high 93%, again placing it at least five points higher than John Wick 1 & 2, Frozen, Wonder Woman, and Black Panther. With audience approval that high, logically the film should benefit from strong word of mouth and enjoy a lengthy, profitable theatrical release ensuring at least one sequel.

The movie is an admirable homage to Yukito Kishiro’s Gunnm manga despite not being completely faithful. Among the more prominent alterations, Dr. Chiren doesn’t even exist in the original manga. She was a character invented for the 1993 anime OVA series. Her relationship to Dyson Ido in the movie is different in the movie than in the earlier OVAs. In the manga, motorball isn’t even mentioned until after the events of the live-action picture. Alita/Gally/Yoko doesn’t even begin to learn of her origin, and also doesn’t obtain the berserker body until long after the events depicted in the movie. And the movie doesn’t hint at the revelation of the true nature of Zalem’s citizens and how that revelation impacts Ido. However, since the film has already taken some liberties with the original manga scenario, precedent has been set for it to be even more flexible with a potential sequel.

I would hypothetically suggest that a sequel movie occur in two halves. Considering that the movie places Desty Nova in Zalem rather than on earth, the first hour of the sequel could depict Alita’s ascension to Zalem, her partnership with Lou Collins, and her first battle against Nova, which could potentially be transitioned into a battle against Melchizedek. The second half of the film could then very easily transpose Nova with Aga Mbadi and conduct a version of the ZOTT tournament on Zalem in order to allow the second film to go all out with the dizzying effects-laden Panzer Kunst battles. Such a heavily condensed re-telling would necessarily eliminate the existence of many characters including Figure Four, KAOS, Den, and all of Barjack. However, the movie’s placement of Nova in Zalem instead of in the Scrapyard would automatically seem to eliminate, or at least change the location of Alita’s raid on Nova’s laboratory and the development of the Barjack saga. Furthermore, Nova’s presence in Zalem also seems to eliminate the possibility of the Granite Inn raid that concludes the original Gunnm manga series. Furthermore, the first film has already suggested that it planned to drastically condense the motorball saga and scale back the significance of Jashugan to a mere single-scene cameo. So transferring much of the post-motorball story to Zalem and concentrating on Alita becoming a Tuned would seem to make more sense for the context of the live-action movie continuity. Alita’s time spent with Four and Barjack are important to her development as a character, but the first movie has already supplanted some of that character development. And in the grand scope of the Gunnm saga, most of the characters and events of the second half of the first manga series don’t resurface in Last Order or Mars Chronicle and aren’t essentially necessary to an American sequel.

And wouldn’t we all love to see Alita with a bionic cat tail during the second half of a potential Alita: Battle Angel 2?