Alita: Battle Angel
Two-years in the making (apparently), and now we finally have the manga-adaptation that to my knowledge hardly anyone was waiting for, judging by the box-office returns that is. If you were anything like me, you saw the trailer during a screening of a superhero-film, and if you even more like me you looked at it and went ‘Whaaaa?’
Photo courtesy of Fox Movies
What you get is pretty much the same focus on the effects and the world-building as was the case with Avatar. Here the story is pretty much an menagerie of Blade Runner terminology with the plot from Elysium and countless other sci-fi films. The effects are nice but the impressive quality is lost after you look at it for too long. Beyond that though the film offers little unless your an ultra-manga fan, and even then its a push!
Overall it just seems like filler for those (if there are any) desperately waiting for Avatar 2 next year. You get the sense that the only people who understand or care about the thing are the people who made it, but believing that their audience is already of the same mindset.
2/4
Happy Death Day 2U
Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures
The first Happy Death Day was something of a pleasent surprise; it was smart, scary and witty in its parody of the slasher-genre. Combining the classic 80s clichés within the context of a Groundhog Day scenario made for an interesting story the first time around. Sadly the characters from the first one really only had one decent go in them, so it’s somewhat painful for the same thing to be done again, in an even more ridiculous money-grabbing format so painfully blatent you get the impression the producers couldn’t care less because they knew people were going to pay. The best way to describe the film for the DVD cover would be “The first one with a dash of parrellel universe.”
This is the kind of film that wreaks of the kind of thing the Scream films were parodying. It’s so dull and pointless that it becomes the very thing that it was taking the mick out of in the first place.
A complete waste of my time and I hope to God that I don’t get suckered again like this!
1/4
