New Footage of Robert Rodriquez and James Cameron's ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL Screened and I'm Impressed
During the 20th Century Fox presentation at CinemaCon, director Robert Rodriguez came out to present a new trailer for Alita: Battle Angel as well as a couple of clips. We've already seen one trailer for the film, but this new footage that was shown gives us a better sense of what the movie is going to be about.
First of all, I love the design work of this film and the main character, Alita (Rosa Salazar) has such a wonderfully strange and unique design! What we saw in this new footage seemed a lot more polished than the footage we saw in the first trailer. The whole point of the look was to give the character a more anime style look and seeing that in a photorealistic way is really strange but cool.
In the story, Alita is trying to find her real self and her impact on society. It's kind of like a sci-fi version of Pinocchio. The film is set several years in the future and Alita is a cyborg who wakes up in Iron City with no memory of who she is or the world she's in. She was found in the scrapyard by Ido (Christoph Waltz), who is a compassionate cyber-doctor who takes the unconscious cyborg Alita to his clinic. We learn that the body he gives her is one that he created for his own daughter, who tragically passed away from Leukemia.
It's explained that everything is new to Alita, every experience she is going through is a first. "As she learns to navigate her new life and the treacherous streets of Iron City, Ido tries to shield Alita from her mysterious past while her street-smart new friend, Hugo (Keean Johnson), offers instead to help trigger her memories. A growing affection develops between the two until deadly forces come after Alita and threaten her newfound relationships. It is then that Alita discovers she has extraordinary fighting abilities that could be used to save the friends and family she’s grown to love. Determined to uncover the truth behind her origin, Alita sets out on a journey that will lead her to take on the injustices of this dark, corrupt world, and discover that one young woman can change the world in which she lives."
One of the places that this journey leads her is to a place where she finds another cyborg body. She believes that body is meant for her, but Ido doesn't want her to have it because it is from a time long before and is meant as a weapon of destruction. Of course, that doesn't stop her from going after it and she is going to have to fight some pretty crazy looking villainous cyborgs to get it.
The first clip that was screened shows Alita waking up for the first time with her new body. Everything is a little strange for her at first but she manages to be able to get out of bed and walk over to a mirror to look at herself. She seems very happy with what she is seeing.
The second clip was an action-packed sequence that shows Alita getting into a brutal brawl with a big cyborg that has chain-metal nails that he is able to shoot out at her. We saw a brief clip of this in the first trailer, but seeing the whole thing play out on the big screen was pretty spectacular. Alita is very nimble as she jumps around, dodges his attack moves, and strikes back at him with precision and force.
The new footage I saw definitely got me more excited for the film. It looks like Rodriguez and producer and writer James Cameron really did something special with this movie, and I can't wait to see it!
The film is based on the graphic novel series Gunnm by Yukito Kishiro, and this is the synopsis that was released:
Visionary filmmakers James Cameron (Avatar) and Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) create a groundbreaking new heroine in Alita: Battle Angel, an action-packed story of hope, love and empowerment. Set several centuries in the future, the abandoned
Alita: Battle Angel also stars Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein, and Jackie Earle Haley. The movie is set to be released on July 20, 2018.