E.R. Torre's Blog, page 30

Tenet (2020) a (Very Mildly) Belated Review

I watched the film yesterday and, honestly, it feels like maybe I should wait until I see it again before offering a review.

However, given the film runs 2 hours and 30 minutes, I don’t know when I’ll get that chance. Besides, I think I got most of what the film was about but will acknowledge it is quite deep and it does, like the best of director/writer features, ask the audience to think and not just passively watch what goes on screen.

Having said all that, the film is essentially a James Bond movie -specifically the 1965 film Thunderball– mixed with time travel elements.

Indeed, as the hours passed following seeing the movie, the more and more I realized the movie’s basic plot was indeed a variation of Thunderball. Just for the hell of it, here’s the trailer to that film:

While not one of the best of the Bond films and perhaps the first one (it was the fourth made) to start showing a little wear on the whole Bond formula, Thunderball nonetheless is an entertaining large scale Bond film involving the theft of a nuclear device and Bond’s attempts to get it back before its used to start a nuclear war… and possible Armageddon.

The film’s villain, Largo, is essentially duplicated in Tenet’s Sator (played with menace -and an at times silly Russian accent, by the very British ). Sator, like Largo, is very rich and spends plenty of time on his very large and luxurious yacht. Like in Thunderball, Sator is intent on getting a device which could spell the end of the world, only in his case its something that affects time itself.

The movie features as “Protagonist”, a no-name hero who, after showing he’s willing to die for his the right cause, is “recruited” into a shadowy world where time is fluid and can run backwards. The fate of humanity is on the line, and with the help of his right hand man Neil ( in a sorta/kinda Felix Leiter role), they navigate the current situation and devise a way to stop Sator from ending the world.

To do this, they have to go through his wife Barbara (, quite good) who is being held on a leash by Sator and suffers greatly from this.

The movie certainly has a Inception-like quality along with its James Bond theme, and there wasn’t a moment where I wasn’t enjoying myself.

However, after the film was finished, there were certain problems with the plot that, at least for me, reared their head. Sadly, when you deal with time travel, especially where various characters are able to do so at will, one begins to wonder why the hero or villain don’t just go “back” to where they can fix things so they succeed and their nemesis fails.

I don’t want to get into SPOILERS, but this is increasingly the case toward the film’s ending. While Mr. Nolan tries to explain away these discrepancies with talk of the Grandfather paradox and fate and history being “set”, the reality is that until time travel is a reality, there is no reason to think we can’t go in time and “reset” the past.

The Grandfather paradox, for example, involves the idea that if we can travel back in time and kill our Grandfather before he conceives one’s father, how is it possible for you (the grandson/daughter) to even exist to go back in time to then kill your Grandfather? Wouldn’t you cease to exist if you were to kill your Grandfather before your father/mother was conceived? But then how did you exist to be able to go and possibly do this to your Grandfather?

It’s a philosophical question, one which has no answer, but I would argue that if time travel were possible (which is an open question, to say the least!) then the idea of multiverses and alternate timelines has to be considered. Thus, you could kill your Grandfather which would change the timeline and mean you now come from a timeline where your Grandfather lived but now, in this new one, the lineage stops yet you can theoretically continue to exist.

I know I’m probably botching the explanation, but its the best I can do off the top of my head.

So, if i do believe that timelines can change, I obviously believe that nothing is set in stone once you move from one time to another. You therefore can murder Adolf Hitler as a baby and, while WWII could still happen, it will do so without Hitler’s presence.

Similarly, some of the things which happen toward the end of Tenet, to my mind, don’t have to happen the way they do. We could simply go back to other points in time to resolve or screw them up worse!

As I said, Nolan movies sure can make you think.

Overall, Tenet is an easy recommendation, a film that borrows the best of James Bond and marries it with some brain twisting time travel. It moves like lightning and is filled with surprises and big set pieces.

Yeah, an easy recommendation.

The Long Election of Joe Biden

Beware… politics!

Yesterday, December 14th the electoral college formally certified Joe Biden’s win. There was no monkey business -though there were attempts!- and the process moved smoothly.

In the evening, Joe Biden, who has been remarkably restrained to this point, gave a speech following the electoral college win becoming official wherein he pointed out the fact that this was it.

It is.

Remarkably, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, hardly a friend of the United States, formally congratulated Joe Biden on his win.

Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy, the head of Republicans in Congress, and Mitch McConnell, the head of Republicans in the Senate, have yet to do so.

In-freaking-credible.

(POST-SCRIPT: Today, in the morning and the day after the electoral college made it official, Mitch McConnell finally announced and congratulated Joe Biden’s win. I suppose he’ll justify this delay by saying he was waiting for when the electoral college results were “official” but one wonders why he couldn’t do it yesterday, before Vladimir Putin. I guess its one of those things, right? On the plus side, for the most senior member of the Republican Party and head of the Senate to make this declaration all but puts the final nail in Trump’s re-election fantasies)

Further, Bill Barr, the head of the Justice Department and a man who has, in the opinion of many, disgraced himself for his multiple instances of seeming to be a defender of the President rather than a neutral party to justice, was either fired or resigned from his post, effective December 23rd.

Rats abandoning ship?

Given that Joe Biden won’t be officially the President of the United States until January 20th, I have to admit while it pleases me Bill Barr is gone, one worries about who may follow and what monkey business Trump will try to engage in with what will surely be another sycophant.

Given all that’s occurred to date regarding Barr, one wonders if maybe his resignation/firing might have been due to not wanting to do whatever new bizarre things Trump wants.

Trump, many suspect, is terrified of the day he loses power. He knows that when his Presidency is over, the floodgates may well open and he will be facing his many past transgressions, from shady financial dealings to possible tax dodging to rape.

While he can issue pardons -and there are those who expect a flurry of them- its unclear if he can pardon himself. Further to that, some of the legal issues he faces, particularly the financial/tax issues, are coming from New York and would be state charges. Presidents can issue pardons for Federal Charges, but not State Charges.

Needless to say, I think it’ll be an interesting month to come.

I think Trump will keep flailing and I suspect there will be those who will continue to try to help him out.

But come January 20th -which can’t come soon enough in my opinion- all that nonsense stops.

Cyberpunk 2077, Released Too Soon Or…

…perhaps it was underdeveloped to begin with?

By now, most people out there who are into video games know about Cyberpunk 2077.

The game is easily one of the most highly anticipated releases of 2020, both for the “cyberpunk” concept and the fact that the studio which made it, Projekt Red, were also behind the magnificent (IMHO!) Witcher III game.

At least my thinking went like this: If they do even half as good a job as bringing to life a dystopian future like they did with the fantasy world of the Witcher, then this game has to be a home run, no?

…well…

The game’s release was announced but then delays set in. Finally, the title was released last week…

And then the trouble started.

The game’s graphics turned out to be in some cases quite poor depending on the system used, expending older system’s graphic capabilities and, in some cases, causing crashes. So many complaints were lodged that the studio quickly announced they would release a patch right after the game’s release and were working hard on subsequent patches to fix the game.

This is disheartening stuff, that a studio would release a game in such demand without doing proper quality control to make sure it actually worked well with all systems it was meant to work on!

Sadly, it seems to get worse.

As bad as releasing a game without proper quality control over how it plays on various systems is, this can be fixed with time and with various patches.

What is more concerning are people’s reactions to the story presented within the game.

There were players who noted that, while the game allows you to pick and choose between various different character “types” to play as your Avatar, after the first 20 minutes or so of gameplay these various Avatars prove to have no real impact on the story told… basically, you wind up playing the same game after 20 minutes regardless of your Avatar.

Or, to put it even more bluntly: Your Avatar doesn’t matter.

So why bother giving players the option of creating a unique Avatar?

Worse still, the game that follows has all kinds of glitches on its own, bad A.I. (again, according to several players) and an underwhelming overall story.

If the players are right, these things won’t be easily fixed with a patch.

I can’t help but wonder if with Cyberpunk 2077 history is kinda/sorta repeating itself.

Bear with me here…

When Game of Thrones, the HBO series, first came out, it was an incredible hit. The show benefitted, for at least four or five seasons, from being able to adapt the books of G. R. R. Martin. However, when the producers ran out of Mr. Martin’s books and the stories within them (the final two novels are yet to be released), the show took a sudden downturn, eventually ending in a way many fans of the show found terrible.

With Witcher III, Projekt Red were able to adapt the stories and novels written by Andrzej Sapkowski. However, with Cyberpunk 2077, these same people didn’t have the benefit of adapting any previously written stories. In fact, with Cyberpunk 2077, as was the case with the later seasons of Game of Thrones, they were creating something “new” and, perhaps in both cases, it proved to be too much for them.

I hope not.

I pre-purchased Cyberpunk 2077 solely on how much I loved Witcher III but I have to admit, these early reviews have me concerned.

I’ll eventually play it, when I have the free time.

Though I really hope the critics are proven wrong, I very much fear they may be right.

Sad Story…

Over on theguardian.com Alexis Petridis offers a look at Bee Gee Barry Gibb, 74 years old and the last remaining Gibb brother…

The Bee Gee’s Barry Gibb: “There’s fame and there’s ultra-fame – It can destroy you.”

As someone who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, I was all too familiar with the meteoric rise of The Bee Gees, mostly on the wave of Disco and the film Saturday Night Fever…

Here’s the thing: As monster a hit as the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was, as popular as Disco was, there was an incredible backlash that happened only a couple of years after its zenith.

I recall a professor in High School or College mused that the death of Disco was inevitable the moment the parents (the older generation) showed up at the Discos and the younger crowds decided they no longer wanted any part of it. But there were other issues as well, and some feel they might have related to homophobia or perhaps the too “out there” styles of that time.

I don’t know.

As I said, I grew up in that era but I was too young to go to Discos and by the time I could go to clubs, Disco was long gone.

But, as with all things, there comes a re-evaluation over time and I suspect people hold the Disco era in far better/nicer terms than they did in the later 1970’s and into the 1980’s, when there was a sense it should not only be buried, but incinerated before burying.

Which brings us to the above article. Barry Gibb, as I noted, is the last remaining Gibb brother. Maurice and Robin, the two brothers who along with Barry made up the Bee Gees, and younger brother Andy Gibb, are gone. Andy Gibb, who had at least one big hit with the song Shadow Dancing…

…was a cocaine addict and would die at the too young age of 30.

Brothers Maurice and Robin would die years later, and they too had problems with addiction.

What’s saddest regarding this article is that not only does Barry Gibb still feel the hurt of how people turned against their music (the author notes he is surprised people like the music now) but how his relationship with his brothers in turn soured as their success grew.

Barry Gibb notes that he was essentially not talking to his brothers when they passed away, and I can’t imagine the pain that must cause in him.

Once someone’s gone, whatever chance at closure is gone as well.

Still, the music remains and, one must note, it is still remembered and, in many parts, cherished.

A sad article, certainly, but at least there’s that.

Weird Stuff…!

Sometimes you stumble upon an article and it just… wow.

Over at i09.gizmodo.com, we have this article by Beth Elderkin:

The Mystery of Illinois’ Short-Lived Cookie Monster Mural

The mural in question:

Basically, what we have here is a joke mural, showing the Cookie Monster as being some kind of hero to the Soviet Union. A funny, pretty well done mural…

…but…

Read the article, I implore you! I’ll spoil a little of it below but truly you should read the article to get the full story.

Anyway, someone who claimed to own the building the mural was painted on contacted an artist and commissioned this mural. The artist was paid but told to paint the mural quickly which, after they planned it out, they did. This was NOT an easy task. The mural was large and required three people to paint it.

Thing is, once the mural was done, the REAL owner of the building contacted the artist, furious that he had painted on his building and threatening to sue, or worse, call the police for vandalism!

The artist explained what happened and offered to paint over the mural for free, but the owner of the building, apparently not wanting any more to do with the artist, did so himself.

The mural is gone, but clearly this was some very elaborate-and expensive!- practical joke done on the owner of the building.

As for who actually hired the artist, and why choose this particular theme/picture, I hope one day we find out!

The Hunted (2003) a (very) Belated Review

Weird how things work out, no? A few days ago I reviewed a film called The Hunt (you can read it here) and yesterday I catch the directed, , , and starring 2003 film The Hunted.

Other than the fact that we do have a person “hunting” -and being hunted!- by another person, these films have very little else in common. Here’s the movie’s trailer:

Those familiar with director William Friedkin no doubt are familiar with his two best known films, The Exorcist and The French Connection. Those who are really familiar with him know he made two other pretty damn good films beyond those, Sorcerer and To Live and Die In L.A.

But, like just about any creative soul out there, there are hits and there are misses and Mr. Friedkin has certainly had a few films that are simply not up to the caliber of those I mention above.

I would put The Hunted on that list but would quickly add that just because it doesn’t quite reach the level of “prime” William Friedkin doesn’t mean the film is bad.

In fact, I mostly enjoyed The Hunted for what it was, a for the most part straightforward action film which pits Mr. Jones and Mr. Del Toro’s characters against each other.

The plot goes like this: Aaron Hallman (Benecio Del Toro) was trained along with many other U.S. military men by L. T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones) to be a merciless, shadowy killer. He does his job only too well but in the hellish conditions of the Serbian war, he cracks.

Stateside, he brutally kills two hunters and the F.B.I., including agent Abby Durrell (Connie Nielsen), contact the now retired Bonham to help them hunt and capture the man responsible for these killings. They don’t know it, but Bonham recognizes the characteristics of the kill and suspects the person responsible is one of his trainees.

Bonham is an interesting character. He claims to have never fired a weapon (and, indeed, in the movie he never does) and while he trained people in how to kill, he himself claims to have never actually done so. Further, he now lives in a remote mountain cabin and appears uninterested in harming anyone or any animal (he helps one early on) despite the fact that he possesses the knowledge and skills to do so.

Though reluctant to join the F.B.I., Bonham does so and soon confirms the killer is one of “his”. He tells the F.B.I. to stand back and goes on the hunt for the killer, soon coming face to face with him.

I don’t want to get into spoilers here, so I won’t discuss more of the plot but it is very straightforward as I said above. Unlike some of the better Friedkin works, this one doesn’t have layers of meaning below the surface. The movie essentially plays out like a variation of the first Rambo film, First Blood, only the “bad” guy in this case is the one with the PTSD.

The action is for the most part well done but toward the film’s climax things got a little wonky. It seemed like there were scenes missing here and there. For example, one sequence has Bonham jumping on a train and in the background you can clearly see the police with drawn guns moving toward the train, yet at no point before that moment are they behind the train! Further, when Bonham heads out for the final confrontation between himself and Hallman, there are odd sequences interspersed, of the F.B.I. flying around the general area (it seems very unlikely these two wouldn’t notice helicopters near them) and the way Bonham tracks Hellman also seems a little disjointed. Further, it strains credulity that both Bonham and Hellman have the time -and are not bothered!- while they create weapons to fight each other. This is particularly silly in the case of Hellman’s weapon… I’ll say no more!

Still, as I said before, the film is for the most part an entertaining if not extraordinary action film which benefits from the charisma of the leads.

Not spectacular, but recommended nonetheless.

Hellboy (2019) a (Mildly) Belated Review

The latest iteration of Hellboy, featuring director taking over for (who I suspect at this point does whatever film he wants to do) and taking over for in the lead role, had me interested in its first few minutes.

Understand, I’m a pretty big fan of the Hellboy comics. Further, I felt once Harbour showed up as Hellboy he did a pretty good job with the character, though I would note rather quickly that he seemed to be following in Perlman’s footsteps.

Still, he was pretty good.

But then…

I’ll get to the movie in a moment but first, here’s the Red Band trailer for Hellboy…

Anyway, we start in the past, with witches being put down, including the head witch Nimue, the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich). Then we’re up to the “present” and introduced to Hellboy, who is in Mexico seeking out a fellow agent in the B.P.R.D. (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, the organization that goes after evil creatures and which Hellboy belongs to, at least in the early going of the comic books). He finds the agent in a “lucha” ring, ie a wrestling arena, and all hell breaks loose.

So far, so good.

…but then…

Two words: Information dump.

In many ways this new Hellboy feature reminded me of Ryan Reynold’s favorite movie role punching bag: the 2011 film Green Lantern.

How so?

Well, because both films were overfilled with references to so many different characters and stories and individual comic books that it became something of a mess.

Both Green Lantern and Hellboy were betrayed by scripts that couldn’t focus and hit us with so much …stuff… that after a while one begs for simplicity and clarity and focus, which are simply not to be found.

As I mentioned, we have the Blood Queen. We then go to the Mexican luchador sequence (and vampires), then we side step to the Wild Hunt, then Baba Yaga and her bizarre house, then… ugh.

I mean, I could understand many of the references because I’m familiar with the books they’re based on, but could you imagine a James Bond film gets released and it features Bond first going up against Dr. No, then Blofeld, then Pussy Galore shows up, then Bond finds the love of his life and marries her only to have her killed, then he goes up into space to thwart a megalomaniac trying to poison humanity and comes down to a Voodoo plantation to deal with drug runners and in the meantime avoids an assassin with a Golden Gun…

I mean, if you’re a James Bond fan you know what I’m referencing, but if all those elements were pushed together in one film, the ultimate results would have been an overload and that’s what’s happened here.

I suppose one also has to acknowledge the fact that there are many -myself not included, alas, and you can read more about that below- who love the two Guillermo Del Toro directed Hellboy films and had a tough time with him leaving that franchise.

Add to that some strange/wild behind the scenes stories regarding director Neil Marshall (you can read about that here and here), and even some pointed statements by David Harbour about the film’s reception and production (there are rumors he didn’t get along with director Neil Marshall and the film had some 16 producers through its making and further rumors are that they did not agree often. You can read about that here) and you have issues.

It just seemed like too many things were going against the work to begin with. Too much ambition in showing all these interesting comic book elements when they didn’t need to. Too many “cooks in the kitchen”, so to speak, and a script that needed paring down rather than being so overstuffed.

Yet the film looks pretty sharp, I must say, and the action is good. Still, the film winds up being like Green Lantern, an overstuffed work that ultimately just isn’t all that good.

POSTSCRIPT: Regarding the two Guillermo Del Toro Hellboy films: I can’t say I’m a huge fan of those two films either, though I would say of the three Hellboy features, they are better than the most recent.

While they both looked terrific and boasted incredible special effects, the first film felt a little underwhelming to me, fizzling toward its end. The second, I felt, was like this new Hellboy in that there was too much going on and it felt like there were climaxes after climaxes to the point where I was exhausted.

All this, of course, is IMHO!

First Appearance of Covid-19 in US… December of 2019?

Over at The Wall Street Journal, Betsy McKay offers this intriguing article:

Covid-19 Likely in U.S. in Mid-December 2019, CDC Scientists Report

The bottom line of the article is that examination of blood samples collected from December of 2019 show that the virus was already in the U.S. a few weeks before China identified the disease and about a month before the first “official” case was found in our country.

Way, way back in late March of 2020, when the lockdowns were first starting and everyone was shutting down, I wrote about how I thought maybe I, and several people around me, might have contracted the Coronavirus in early/mid January and into early February. (You can read my entry about that here)

Mind you, there was no thought at that time the Covid-19 was in the U.S., yet as I noted in my post above, our family business was very busy at the time and we were in contact with people from quite literally all over the world. There was also a little thing called the Super Bowl which happened on February 2nd in Miami, and which caused our area to fill up with many people… also from all parts of the world.

So back then, my father and several people we knew around us got quite sick and the illness lasted a long time, some two weeks or more, before they kicked it out of their systems. In later January and into early February I too caught something and I wasn’t sure what. I had my flu shots in October of 2019 and it seemed unlikely I caught the flu.

However, I caught something. I felt incredibly weak/exhausted at the end of workdays and, especially, work weeks. I literally felt I needed to collapse in bed and rest.

Luckily, my wife didn’t catch it and, eventually, whatever I had left my system.

Afterwards, I couldn’t help but think maybe those around me and I caught the Coronavirus in the very early -and for many unknown- days of its spread. Given the Wall Street Journal article, it certainly is possible.

It’s scary to think we may have had a potentially fatal disease at a time when no one thought it was spreading in the U.S. and, had any of us gotten really sick, in those very early days of the virus treatment would have been far from well thought out.

If indeed it was COVID-19 we had, we were lucky and made it through. Happily, everyone who caught whatever it was is back to normal.

Still, the idea the people around me and I could have been exposed to Coronavirus before it became known is a chilling thought indeed.

The Hunt (2019), a (Mildly) Belated Review

Back in 2019 the movie The Hunt was scheduled to be released but, after mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Universal Studios decided to pause the release of the film (you can read about that here).

Before that happened, I wrote about the film and its original trailer, which I felt gave away pretty much the total story of the film (you can read the original article here, but beware that some of the embedded material, including that original trailer, were taken down).

If you go to that original article, I go into what this movie obviously is: Another riff on what I think may be the most adapted story of all time, Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game.

The story involved a shipwreck victim who washes up on an island only to realize the man who lives there has a peculiar habit: He likes to hunt human prey.

The story was first adapted into a movie with the same name in 1932 and since then I can’t count the times either movies or TV shows or books offer a similar story with that common theme: The idea that someone has decided to hunt humans.

Anyway, after a fashion The Hunt was finally released in March of 2020. This is one of the main trailers used for the film when it was finally released:

Earlier this morning I managed to finish the film off and… man, there is so much to like about it.

I loved as Crystal and , in what amounts to a cameo, was wonderful as the hissable villain. The direction is crisp, the action presented bloody in a grindhouse way. And the concept, while once again owing to Richard Connell’s original story, manages for the most part to present an exciting variation of the well used hunter-hunting-humans concept.

Unfortunately…

The makers of the film, specifically screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse, decided to add another element to the story. They decided to satire current right/left wing politics, presenting the “hunters” as stereotypical liberals and the hunted as stereotypical conservatives. I’m sure “on paper” it sounded like a clever idea, but for me that concept played out really quickly and soon became alternately off-putting and obvious while never quite being as humorous as I suspect they thought it was.

So we have scenes where the hunters talk about global warming or speak about racism while figuring out the proper way to call an African American and do this while gleefully murdering their “conservative” prey who we find slaughter endangered animals or have conspiracy podcasts… and it’s just not all that amusing.

John Carpenter in a few of his films takes on societal satire but manages to do so in a far more effective ways (check out Escape From New York or They Live). Here, I wished the film focused more on its main plot and, especially, Crystal and her fight for survival and not hit us over the head with so many too-obvious “jokes” about liberal or conservative silliness.

If the film had decided to accept and accentuate its Grindhouse elements more while toning down and/or eschewing the obvious -and after a while increasingly silly- political commentaries and not gotten so into the weeds about why the hunt existed (it is explained and, frankly, it was yet another dumb political element, IMHO), the film would have been much more successful.

As it is, if you are in the mood for some bloody fun and can ignore the annoyance of the “satire” that plays out much quicker than the writers thought, then you may find enough to enjoy in this film.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019), A (Mildly) Belated Review

Alita: Battle Angel, released last year and produced by James Cameron and directed by Robert Rodriguez, was one of those films I was curious about seeing but never quite had a chance to catch during its theatrical run.

Not that I was a fan of the original -and much loved!- Yukito Kishiro Manga comics it was based on, but rather because the trailers looked pretty interesting. Interestingly, I have the Manga books but until after seeing the film, I hadn’t read them (another of those things I’ve bought but were sitting around waiting for me to find time for them).

Anyway, here’s one of the movie’s trailers:

I managed to DVR the film when it played on a cable channel and eventually watched it in pieces over the course of three or four days. The film is fairly long, clocking in at 2 hours and 2 minutes and I wonder if maybe I’d sat through the whole thing at one time I might have had a somewhat lesser opinion of it.

I say this because an awful lot occurs in the course of the film and, while it is magnificent to look at, sometimes the plot seems to move in fits and starts and meander. If I had sat through the whole thing at one time, I might have been annoyed by this but, having seen it in pieces, I was more forgiving.

After watching the film I started reading the Manga comics. The original Alita Manga comic book series is collected in a 9 volume series and, it turns out, this movie covers events roughly through the first 3 volumes of those books. Had they followed this pattern, perhaps Cameron and Rodriguez imagined making three Alita films, the two remaining ones intended to cover the final 6 volumes of story originally presented in comic book form.

The movie version of Alita is quite faithful to the comics, though the events are presented in a more overlapping order. Certain things are changed as well, but at least in my opinion the movie was quite faithful to the original comic.

Thing is, “as is” the story is incomplete and ends on something of a “to be continued” note. Sure, we are given a fairly complete tale here, but there is no final resolution and I don’t know if we’ll ever get it. While the film did well cumulatively worldwide, I don’t know if it made enough to justify a sequel. Further, at this moment and while looking over the IMDb listings for both James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez, neither has an Alita sequel listed among their upcoming projects.

So, unfortunately, Alita: Battle Angel may wind up being a stand alone film that doesn’t feature any ultimate resolution. That alone may want some people to stay away from it, and its too bad.

Alita: Battle Angel features as the android known as Alita. She is found in a heap of trash discarded from a mysterious floating city by Dr. Ido (Christopher Waltz). He creates a body for her and she explores the city they live in, falls in love, and comes to realize she may be the last of a line of powerful warrior androids.

It’s interesting enough, though I feel like many of the story beats have been used and reused so much that it doesn’t feel quite as fresh as I’m sure it did when the original Manga comics were released.

Still, the film is enjoyable if a little overlong. I also feel like it could have been tightened up a little more. Jennifer Connelly, for example, has a role in the film which, truthfully, could have been cut completely (I have yet to read the full 9 volumes of the Manga, but at least through the first three there is no character equivalent to her to be found in there).

There are other actors who appear here and there for what amounts to one scene and of course they were likely intended to be used in sequel films.

So… yay or nay?

I recommend the film. It’s a visual delight for sure, though the story could have been tightened up a little and there is the possibility we’ll not see the sequels that will complete the story.

Still, if you’re in the mood for a good adaptation of a beloved Manga comic, this one is worthy of your time.