Alita: Battle Angel product reviews

To be honest I am not a huge sci-fi fan and I had never even heard of Alita. When my husband started saying he wanted to see the movie as had read the comics I had to do my wifey duties and apply for it. I was pleasantly surprised with the movie - no space ships or aliens but some of the most amazing special effects I have ever seen.

From the first scene you are taken back by the amazing footage and then you see Alitas head with the freakishly big eyes and you are just transfixed. Pretty much someone on the screen, at all times, had machanical parts of some discription and it is just so incredibly well made. The fighting and action scenes are just so visually pleasing and you are left wanting more. I could easily watch the cyborgs fight for hours as they having some 'out of this world abilities' not to mention the game of Motorball. CGI has come so far and this just proves it - the budget must of been huge.

One thing I do love about DVDs/BluRays is the special features and I find you can learn more about the directors/writers point of view which is not always conveyed on screen. In this case there was only the two Alita's World which was broken up into four stories. It explains more about the war and how the world became the way it is today and more of Alitas back story. You get to see more of the layout of the Iron City although I would of liked to have seen Zalem the city in the sky where the 'prestigious' live. You find out the rules for Motorball, which is a very entertaining game to watch and one surprisingly that did not become tedious either and then the mechanics/cyborg parts availble to you.

But, the segment that I found the most valuable was 'From Manga to Screen.' James Cameron was a huge fan of the graphic novels that he pain stakingly wrote a screenplay for it at the same time as Avatar. He planned on doing an Avatar movie then Alita followed by Avatar and so forth but instead got so involved with Avatar he put this in the back burner thinking it would never see the light of day. But along came Robert Rodriguez and made it thru Camerons eyes. They basically used all the same production crew and the same CGI componants. Fascinating. You also met the humble Japanese author Yukito Kishiro.

I am surprised at how much I enjoyed the movie. I think because of how visually impressive the movie was and how the action added to the movie and did not detract. There is also the "Romeo and Juliet" love story and the incredible bad guys and it winds up being just a great entertaining story. I am hoping that there is more movies to follow as there are now 19 novels available and this only covered the first five books.