If you haven't read my review of Alita: Battle Angel, one; why are you so mean, and two; in that review I made the point that the film made the mistake of promising a sequel, since American adaptations of Manga and Anime very rarely do well, see the example of Ghost in the Shell, which opened in third on its opening weekend and grossed an abysmal $40 million domestic, despite, I felt, being a solid adaptation of the Anime, or at least a very visually faithful one with a bit of added popcorn value. That film also got one hell of a beating critically, with an RT critic score of forty three percent. Now, I give Rotten Tomatoes a lot of shit, and I will be today as well, but to be fair, the audience score isn't much higher, sitting at just fifty one percent, so clearly Ghost in the Shell did not land for audiences, because no one went to see it and the ones that did were split as to whether it was any good. Ghost in the Shell had another problem around its release too, that being the controversy surrounding Scarlett Johansson's casting in the lead role, which a lot of idiots thought was problematic because whitewashing and representation and buzzword buzzword buzzword. I've talked at length about the concept of whitewashing and how I think it's bullshit; a non issue propagated by progressives with no real love or understanding for the film industry. It occurred to me while writing my review for Alita: Battle Angel that maybe the film escaped any widespread whitewashing allegations because the lead actress; Rosa Salazar, isn't white, never mind then that she wasn't Latin in the Manga either, which technically makes this brownwashing, but since when have progressives been principled. As it turns out though, Alita: Battle Angel hasn't managed to escape the ire of the Progressives after all, what a surprise, but more importantly than that, it's doing something Ghost in the Shell never did, and that's do well at the box office, or at least wellish. But what exactly does that mean for the film, and for Anime and Manga adaptations in general, and will Alita: Battle Angel get the sequel I and so many others think it deserves but will never get, we shall see.
Let's begin with the film's box office numbers, which are far higher than I was expecting them to be. The film opened in first place on its opening weekend, dethroning The Lego Movie 2, which sounds really good, doesn't it, but when you look at actual numbers, the situation gets more complicated. The Lego Movie opened at number one in 2014 with an opening weekend gross of $69 million, which are some pretty solid numbers, the sequel however, while still opening in first, only grossed $34 million, half of what the first film did. I don't know why The Lego Movie 2 grossed so little in its opening, but I do know that this is consistent with the franchise's financial downward trend, being $14 million higher than The Lego Ninjago Movie's rather sad $20 million opening, and $19 million shy of The Lego Batman Movie's $53 million, which, itself, was $16 million shy of The Lego Movie's opening, that's a lot of numbers. When going up against an underperformer like The Lego Movie 2, you'd think a film with James Cameron's name on literally all of the marketing would be a killer, but despite being "From the Producers of Avatar and Titanic," the film was expected to come in at $25 million in its opening week, putting it in the same camp as Ghost in the Shell, which flopped, and also cost a lot less money to make than Alita: Battle Angel. The film has exceeded those predictions however, though not by much, taking its opening weekend's top spot with $33 million. For perspective, this time last year, Black Panther was crushing the box office with a $200 million opening, yet on the same holiday weekend, one year later, the number one spot isn't even making a sixth of that, woof.
So Alita: Battle Angel isn't hitting Black Panther numbers, that's not exactly comparing apples to apples though, with Alita: Battle Angel lacking the built in audience and supposed cultural significance of Black Panther, especially when you consider that Black Panther wasn't tracking to be such a hit and was in fact an overperformer. I have talked in the past about Anime and Manga's audience, specially about how the size of that audience was a factor in the failure of Ghost in the Shell, and that's simply because Anime and Manga, while adored by the fans, doesn't have the same massive appeal was something like Marvel or DC. Its built-in audience is far smaller, making adaptations of them in the west a much bigger risk for studios, because there is no Anime adaptation equivalent of Iron Man or Spider-Man; no film has broken that audience and cultural barrier and gone big in the way that many of the Marvel films of the 2000's did. Does the fact that Alita: Battle Angel exceeded expectations mean that said barrier has been broken, and that films like Ghost in the Shell will finally have mass appeal in the west, I still doubt that as one moderate success doesn't indicate a trend, nor would Detective Pikachu releasing and grossing a shit tillion dollars, as Pokémon is a different beast entirely. What this means right now is that Alita: Battle Angel has found an audience, people want more Alita: Battle Angel and that extra $10 million at the opening, while far from mind blowing, is a testament to that.
There is a problem though, and that is competition; Alita: Battle Angel might have taken the crown in its first week, but a $34 million opening still isn't massive, and it'll be facing some serious competition come the release of Captain Marvel, which is still expected to open to $80 million dollars despite its lead star being a detestable egomaniac with the expressiveness of a table. Even with the controversy swelling around Captain Marvel and its increasingly unambiguous feminist agenda, the film will still at least do ok, it could come in under $50 million, a disaster by MCU standards, or it could come in with Wonder Woman numbers, $100 million or higher, either way, it'll be curtains for Alita: Battle Angel. That's also assuming it manages to keep up with How To Train Your Dragon 3, which is projected to gross $40 on its opening weekend. This is the primary reason I still worry for the future of Alita on screen, because while it's top dog now, it's king of a very small hill, and there are some big hitters on the way, films that'll crush Alita: Battle Angel with ease. That being said however, Bumblebee, my favourite film of 2018, opened with a pathetic $21 million, and is, in no uncertain terms, a domestic flop, but found a stronger footing internationally, carrying it to a few million shy of half a billion dollars worldwide. Alita: Battle Angel's fate will probably be very similar, middling domestic numbers, but saved from being a flop by international success, something already observable in its box office numbers; grossing almost twice as much internationally as it has domestically, the film also has yet to be released in China and Japan as of me writing this, two countries where its chances of being successful are pretty good. So for once, A Manga adaptation might actually get a sequel, which would be awesome because Alita: Battle Angel is awesome, seriously, that thing's happening again, I'm getting obsessed.
Alita: Battle Angel is in a tight spot, it's grossed higher than expected and has yet to be released in one of the largest cinema markets in the world, but Stateside, it's time in the top spot will be very brief, what with How To Train Your Dragon 3 and Captain Marvel on the horizon. The film might end up making sequel numbers yet, we'll know in time. But now it's time to stop talking numbers and start looking into the other topic of the day, the more fun topic, Alita: Battle Angel pissing off the SJW's and the critics. Unlike Ghost in the Shell, Alita: Battle Angel's RT audience score is good, very good, even, sitting at ninety four percent, which is a damn solid number, unlike its critic score, which sits at just fifty nine percent. Once again, there is a noticeable disparity between the RT audience and critic score, and while its usually the critics raving while the audience aren't fans, like Venom, Alita: Battle Angel is reversed, audiences love it while the critics hate it. What's weird however is what the critics are saying, or rather what they think they're saying, you'll understand in a sec. One top critic for example, one Joe Morgenstern of the WSJ apparently "[can't] get past the film's brain." I'm not a WSJ subscriber so I can't read the full review, but I'll take a guess that he finds the film to be inconsistently and poorly written, it's the wording of the comment that I find odd though, "-the film's brain." A lot of critics also talk negatively about the film's mystery, with one comparing it to a homework assignment, as if it wasn't Cameron and Rodriguez's idea to leave a load of unanswered questions. You could go and do the homework, read through all the volumes of the original Manga, which is something I myself might actually do, but why not enjoy the mystery too, mystery is a great way of building a world, and Alita: Battle Angel does that really well. If you already had all the answers in the first film, why would you need a sequel, but Alita: Battle Angel makes you need that sequel through its very controlled delivery of answers, and its blatant sequel set up ending, but that's not the point.
One review stood out to me though, and that was by one Rick Kisonak of Seven Days, a newspaper from Vermont, who gave the film one star out of five in his review titled; "There's nothing new under the dystopian steampunk sun in 'Alita: Battle Angel'." As usual, it's better that you take that link and read the full review, because I won't be addressing all of the points in it and it's better if you have the other side of this rebuttal so that you, you know, understand what's going on.
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/alita-battle-angel/Content?oid=25960899
There's a little problem with this review right out the gate, and that's the author's referring to the film as steampunk in his title, which is such a massive oversight in his view of the film that I question if I'm even reading it right, because Alita: Battle Angel is not steampunk. Alita: Battle Angel is set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic far future where society has broken down, where the law is enforced by cyborg bounty hunters instead of police, and where a massive number of the population have augmented themselves with cybernetic parts, it is, completely and unapologetically, cyberpunk. This oversight is a bit more serious than you'd think because it comes from someone who hated the film, and shows, in painful clarity, that he didn't understand it, that he doesn't even know what genre it is when it is telegraphed so loudly that the URM can hear it. Our author really isn't off to a good start in his review, he's dropped the ball in his title, god only knows what the rest of the review contains.
Our author then does something I genuinely didn't expect, he compared the film, Alita: Battle Angel to the First World War, quoting some pointless philosophy as if it's at all applicable to this film, which he seems to think it is. His comparing this film to WWI however is, frankly, fucking ridiculous, seriously, what on Earth is he talking about. His point is that Alita: Battle Angel and the war are the same in that they're pointless, which I'm sure sounds very smart to him, and doesn't at all make him look like a tool, and as with our moron who hated Ghostbusters last time, this moron is free to dislike the movie, he's even free to nonsensically compare a Cyberpunk film based on a Manga to WWI, but he's wrong, he's wrong that Alita: Battle Angel is devoid of meaning, he's also factually wrong about the film itself, because he seems to think that Iron City's population also includes robots, which, like the film apparently being Steampunk, demonstrates that he has no idea what he's talking about. Iron City's population is not a mix of human and robot, nor is Zalem a District 9 or Elysium ripoff, given that the Manga Alita: Battle Angel based on predates both of those films by twenty years, and this idiot also doesn't remember that for the entirety of the film we only see the underside of Zalem, so his assessment that Zalem is a Nostromo ripoff too is wrong, as is his assessment that people would only want to live there because it's the future, because, again, we never see Zalem up close, life on Zalem is something we do not see, which is deliberately the case.
Like I said in my review of the film, Zalem is portrayed as a heavenly, unobtainable paradise, a place beyond the reach and even the comprehension of the lower classes down in Iron City, and we, the audience, know as much about the place as the characters in the film, which is to say we know nothing, that's the point. I Struggle to comprehend his next remark about Alita being a cartoon, I honestly can't believe someone would miss the point of a film's main character like this guy does, his comment that the URM body she gets later in the film has bigger tits is true, but what's also true is that this reflects a transition in her character, as does her change in clothes, something our moronic author clearly missed, kind of like how the film isn't Steampunk, god, my head is starting to hurt. I'm starting to get a vibe from this guy, because he then references an artist, which at least makes a bit more sense than his referring to a French philosopher, given the context, but I get the distinct impression that this guy thinks he's clever, that he thinks comparing the film to WWI and quoting a philosopher makes him a smart boi, but unfortunately you can't be a smart boi if you're a moron. It's rather fitting that he uses the phrase "appallingly dumb," to describe the film, because his review is appallingly dumb; he compares a film to WWI and quotes philosophy like that means a damn thing, like it excuses his confusing of Steampunk and Cyberpunk, his referring to possibly the best fully CG character ever put to screen as a cartoon, and his missing the point of the bigger tits. I also find it insane that he'd think Alita: Battle Angel is ripping off Elysium when it's twenty years older than Elysium, he does mention that the film is based on a Manga, but that doesn't negate his clear absence of understanding of said Manga, or of how time works, or of how Steampunk and Cyberpunk are different, I don't have time for this, fuck it.
Moral of the Story: Go Watch Alita: Battle Angel!
Got a bit heated from that review, but what can I say, I like cinema and I love Alita: Battle Angel, so a review from an idiot who thinks Steampunk and Cyberpunk are the same thing is going to piss me off a little. There's a pompousness to film critics on Rotten Tomatoes that I cannot stand, and it's getting more and more apparent every day, but what's also becoming more apparent is that no one gives a shit what they have to say, not when a film like Venom makes $850 million, and not when Alita: Battle Angel finds the audience that it really deserves, despite them not being able to get past its brain, whatever the fuck that means. Do you know what pisses me off more though, in a twisted, sadomasochistic sort of way, SJW's, and originally, this post was going to feature a pair of them, individuals who find Alita's design Problematic, but this would have been a stupidly long post, so it's getting its own post. But the moral of today is simple, don't listen to RT critics, and go see Alita: Battle Angel, it's a film that deserves the sequel it still might not get, but it's a great film and it deserves your money, so for the love of god, go see it.
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