"Alita: Battle Angel -- Tales from the Uncanny Valley." Topic

Fox have released a trailer for James Cameron's and Robert Rodriguez's Alita: Battle Angel:

YouTube link

Great Scott, this looks dreadful -- a two-minute teaser that veers from unintentional horror to unintentional comedy. I don't know how two name filmmakers managed to pooch this so bad. Joel, Tom Servo and Crow couldn't save this. It needs to be banished back to whatever circle of Development Hell it emerged from. Someone needs to take their camera away before they do this again.

Ron

Too bad, I really enjoyed the manga.

I'm not familiar with the source material. What's the backstory?

Wow. This movie has been in development for, like, forever. I heard about it years before 'Avatar' came out.

Is this that spelling bee movie? :)

Dan

I think the trailer pretty much follows the same path as the anime YouTube link it is supposed to be horrific but will need to be toned down to get a profitable rating and it is supposed to be funny but in a very black way. I'm looking forward to it.

I'm looking forward to it as well. From that two minute trailer it looks very similar to the manga, which did have a lot of dark humour as well as horror… certainly seems more true to the original than Ghost in the Shell!!

The backstory is that in the distant future, what's left of Kansas City is a junkyard/city dominated by a huge floating city said to be a paradise. While cybernetics are extremely common, things like guns and flying technology are illegal. Daisuke Ido is a cyberdoctor who finds the remains of an ancient cyborg in suspended animation (she's fully mechanical except for her brain) and repairs her, giving her a new body. She has no memory of who she is. When she bumps into the seedier side of the city she appears to be a master of a mysterious ancient martial arts called "Panzer Kunst" A special martial art designed for Cyborgs and allows her to take on opponents many times her own size.

Ultimately she goes off on a quest to discover who she is and find her place.

Looks pretty true to the manga to me.

While the basics make it appear like any other Mad Max/Cyberpunk dystopia, it gets really trippy down the road, revealing how the world came to be and it's rarely what you think or expect. Many of the subsequent reveals are really territory.