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[Tack]

I don’t go in for live action at the best of times. It’s like watching dubbed, except now all of the graphics are dubbed too.

Not that there’s anything wrong with dubs, they’re just personally jarring for me.

[Cruxador]

Well I saw Alita too and I can confirm that it's good. Not just as an adaptation (I never read the original) but as a movie.

Although fair warning, I also enjoyed John Carter, which wasn't widely successful. Alita reminded me of that in that I had fun watching a hero be heroic and buying into the world I was shown. It also reminded me a lot of Thor Ragnarok, to the point that I reckon some writer or other may have read the manga before penning that script.

Not that there’s anything wrong with dubs, they’re just personally jarring for me.

The live action feels pretty natural. The action scenes definitely feel like a comic book movie at times, I guess because they want to faithfully recreate some panels or some anime sequences, but it still flows well and the urban scenes feel like something out of James Bond. The acting is all top tier (except from the love interest, but then my perception may be hindered by my lack of attraction to teenage boys) so it's not like some Netflix adaptation.

[Arx]

Having not seen the movie (I'd like to) but having read the manga, the first love interest didn't particularly grip me in the manga either, so maybe it's just a faithful adaptation of his character.

[Reelya]

Alita is doing a lot better than expected at the box office.

Comparing it to Ghost in the Shell and Solo's opening weekend, GitS did $18 million, Alita did $28 million and Solo did $83 million. Clearly, Solo benefited from brand-name recognition. GitS closed out at $40 million domestic, Solo at $213 million. Alita is sitting on $43 million right now, so definitely beating GitS by a mile. However ... Solo and GitS both have much lower audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes than Alita does, so Alita could see a decent second weekend based on word of mouth.

It's a certainty that Alita will need strong international sales to break even. GitS finished with ~$130 million internationally, and Solo finished with ~$180 million. Alita is currently on $94 million internationally, however, it's yet to open in China and Japan, so I'd say it's going to easily cream Solo in the international box-office take. Chinese and Japanese audiences should in fact benefit from positive word of mouth about the film, along with brand recognition. How many Japanese Gunnm fans d'ya suppose there are?

[EnigmaticHat]

My guess is it would depend on the moviewatching habits of adult Japanese men, since that series is well past its heyday.  Technically still running as a manga tho so the answer to your question is "probably a lot."  Judging by Pacific Rim, China in particular has a large audience for anime-esque Hollywood movies.  Also if I'm understanding Japanese culture right the decision to make a live action movie and give a character anime eyes is something that would be well received there.  Also judging by Pacific Rim a mediocre domestic return foreshadows a big foreign one for a movie like this.

GitS... I don't even know what the hell they were thinking with that movie.  Didn't see it, but the trailer looked like it was imitating the old anime movie shot for shot.  I love that specific movie but its the one with awkward nudity that would feel out of place in modern anime much less a fricken American live action film.  Also Americans are very familiar with specific shots from GitS, specifically the ones that the Matrix unapologetically stole.  In terms of GitS in specific its footprint on modern American pop culture is pretty tiny and the anime movie even less so.  Add that to casting Scarlett Johansson which was pretty much guaranteed to cause controversy.  And I just don't know who they were marketing to.

[Jopax]

Ignoring the casting choices, the GitS movie was a pretty looking mess, they decided to cram togheter stuff from te first movie and the SAC without much rhyme or reason. So in the end you have a bunch of really iconic scenes connected by utter gibberish, culminating in a shit-tier villian and a further middle finger to folks who had an issue with the casting.

[Reelya]

I really don't get it at this point. Seems like some social justice people really have a bone with Alita.

https://screenrant.com/alita-design-problem-big-eyes-body/

problem stated: Alita has "oversexualized" "large breasts" and a "small waist". Here is the screen cap provided:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Oh wow, those really are "large" breasts, amirite? And check out this amazingly small waist and huge breasts in this shot:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The writer makes a big deal of Alita's "ideal body type" ... like they're supposed to make obese combat androids or some shit. I just think they wanted Alita to have a female appearance. Isn't it likely that the average female viewer is going to identify more with someone who has female body type than with some androgynous look.

So, the thing I'm trying to unravel in my mind is why writers who were 100% on board with Wonder Woman's boob-armor (and a waist every bit as small as Alita's, plus the mini-skirt and knee-high boots) are all up in arms about this movie's "breasts" and "waist" when they're clearly a non-issue. Alita is just athletic, but google "top female athletes" and you'll see that Alita's outfit is very tame compared to what female athletes wear.

My main thought is competition: they can brush off a male-fronted movie as irrelevant, but when there's a "(non-SJW) strong female lead", that  needs to be taken down by these people. It gives an alternate view of what a strong woman can be like, and that's untenable ideological competition: similar to how people on your own side of politics can be your worst enemies. So, they attributed default complaints of "huge breasts / small waist" which might be true of Tomb Raider and other "geek" adaptations, to this thing, where it clearly doesn't even apply. Is she supposed to wear loose-fitting clothes to cover up those "sinful" curves? Are we back to the Puritan days now? Alita needs to hide her body-shape? And that's "empowering"?

Many of the articles slamming Alita spend more time complaining about how James Cameron was involved (from writers who praised Wonder Woman for having a female director) rather than discussing any of the things in the movie. Therefore, overt sexualization in Wonder Woman gets a free pass, and merely being female-body-type in this movie gets slammed as something horrendous.

[Frumple]

Ignoring the casting choices, the GitS movie was a pretty looking mess, they decided to cram togheter stuff from te first movie and the SAC without much rhyme or reason. So in the end you have a bunch of really iconic scenes connected by utter gibberish, culminating in a shit-tier villian and a further middle finger to folks who had an issue with the casting.

Man, I'm not interested in the movie as is, but I would totally be up to see if they make it to Last Order and what happens then. I'm not sure what the emotion is for the idea of live action Anomaly but I'm feeling it.

... plus a potential tie-in/promo thing where they roll out that bit with that one heavy metal page? Sign me the hell up. Shrimp bot playing motorcycle ftw.

E: Seriously though, I'm not sure if the world is ready for a beer bottle to be jammed into a giant dick cannon via live action, but I'm willing to watch someone else find out.

[JoshuaFH]

I haven't watched the Alita movie, but from seeing screenshots... god the big anime eyes on a real person just looks freaky and horrifying.

[Reelya]

Ugh, I really should stop following anything. One of the same guys who claimed the low audience score of Last Jedi on Rotten Tomatoes was sheer fakery because of negative review bombing is now sawing that nobody actually liked Alita and the high user-score of that is because of positive review bombing.

While some people paint the battle-lines as PC vs non-PC ... that really doesn't explain a whole lot. Captain Marvel is played by a white woman and Alita is played by a woman of color (hispanic). Kinda seems weird that "white male" review trolls would want to boost Alita, if they hate female-lead and minority-lead films, right?

It's more like a struggle between the paid-reviewer world and the fans / amateur / audience world. The struggle is over the relevance of reviewers as experts/gate-keepers of "all things film" in the face of automated scoring systems and fan-made reviews on Youtube. If audiences like a movie less than the critics, that's fake, if audiences like a movie more than the critics, that's ... also fake.

[Cruxador]

I'm pretty sure Rosa Salazar is white. Speaking Spanish isn't a race.

But yeah, demonizing opinions that don't agree with the media perception has been standard practice for a while, at least since that time it was done so inexpertly as to become obvious back in connection with the gamer gate thing, but probably also more subtly before that. They tried it pretty blatantly with the latest Star Wars too. It's essentially damage control, nobody who already has a negative opinion of a film is going to be swayed by the notion that they actually don't like it because they're toxic shitlords, but demonizing detractors in this way can be used to discredit negative opinions, as an attempt to salvage marketing among those who don't yet have their own opinions on the matter.

I think anime for the most part hasn't had a lot of this kind of bullshit marketing strategy before simply because it was never mainstream in the west to begin with, and the major relevant companies, both in and out of Japan, are primarily made and run by fans still. Netflix is sort of an exception but they have better things to do than put their political capital on the line for shows that are only a small part of their viewership in the first place.

[Jopax]

JFC Mob, that wasn't a turn for dark, you took a goddamn dimensional door into the fucking elemental plane of things going to shit.

WHAT

[Folly]

I just finished binging Made in Abyss.

This show gave me serious Narutaru vibes, what with the cute kids boldly rushing into adventures that ultimately leave them physically and emotionally traumatized. Lots of feels.
I also love the setting that has been cultivated here. It's bold and interesting, and genuinely unlike anything I've seen before. I actually ended up adding this to my rotation of desktop wallpapers:


I hope season 2 comes this year! If not, I may have to break down and just read the manga...

[Frumple]

Please do break down, so you can tell me if/how much the anime toned things down

[Reelya]

Cross-post with sales thread: there's a Hyperdimension Neptunia Humble Bundle right now. You could get the first two main games (HDN: Rebirth are HD remakes of the early games) for $1