The live-action Alita movie is pretty bad in ways fairly common to Anime adaptations: Spontaneous romance, questionable character behavior, and suspect plot developments. Then it decides to throw in some of the more eye-rolling tropes from superhero origin stories (“I know kung-fu!“, only worse) as a bonus. The action scenes at least are engaging for the most part, though that’s certainly not enough to outweigh the cringe-worthy performances (Zapan‘s is the only decent one, and even he goes to shit at the end) and face-palming events.
Captain Marvel is an actually competently constructed adaptation comparatively. Though not without problems (most notably any scene designed to evoke sadness/sympathy) it’s a consistently entertaining mixture of action, comedy, 90’s references, and self-discovery with even the most minor characters getting a brief chance to shine. One aspect which could be taken either way is how events progress/develop at a brisk pace over a short timeframe; on the one hand this keeps you engaged with what’s happening, but on the other it makes the close Danvers-Fury friendship come across as pretty unnatural.
The take-away here is that I’m definitely not watching any potential Alita sequels in the theater (where skipping through painfully awkward scenes isn’t an option), while I just might end up going to see Avengers: Endgame (which ties directly into Marvel‘s post-credits scene).
The creators seemed to have gotten target-fixated on the effect produced by juxtaposing Alita’s character design with human actors. In particular, they got so precious about her eyes as to forget that their effect would comprise but a fraction of the totality. They bet a lot of money on their fixation at the expense of the whole. Cameron may have made a ton of money feeding the lowest common denominator the swill it craves but, if this is the best he can do with a ‘passion project‘, then all I can say is it’s gotta suck being as moneyed as… Read more »