What color is cyborg blood supposed to be? How many bodies does Alita actually have?
What exactly are those blue flames? Keep watching for the “Alita:
Battle Angel” details only real fans notice.
One of the most memorable and exciting parts of Alita:
Battle Angel is the high-octane spectacle that is motorball. There are two matches in the film:
a skirmish on the streets of Iron City and a professional tryout in a super-sized
stadium. Despite these two sequences being decidedly different in terms of the tone,
stakes, and even the visual presentation, both of them utilize real-world camera physics.
Even though the limitations of real-world cameras don't apply when creating an
action scene with CGI, director Robert Rodriguez chose to self-impose those
limitations to create a more grounded sequence. In an interview with Inverse,
he described his methodology for crafting this scene with a sense of realism, as he revealed,
"I don't want the cameras flying around the place, doing things impossible to shoot. I
wanted the physics of real cameras, placement you would see in NASCAR. Long lenses, capturing things
whizzing by, as well as cameras on the track with the players to keep it as real world as possible."
Pulling inspiration from the shooting style of
real-world sports and sticking only to shots that would be possible with
a physical camera ultimately grounded the bombastic action with a sense of reality.
The character of Alita starts out the film as a total amnesiac. While struggling to recall
details from her past, she finds herself stumbling into some dangerous situations.
Luckily, she possesses an instinctive fighting technique that kicks in when she's threatened.
This combat style is known as Panzer Kunst, a German term which translates into English as
"Armor Art." Panzer Kunst comes directly from the manga series that inspired the film. Within the
series lore, Panzer Kunst originated on Mars as a martial-arts style for use in zero-gravity combat.
In real life, Panzer Kunst refers to the art of defeating armored opponents in combat,
which is fitting considering that the majority of combatants in Alita are heavily armored cyborgs.
The first descriptions of real-life Panzer Kunst in sword fighting are believed to come
from a German fencing manual from the 1440s. This instructional guide offered insights into
fighting techniques to be used against both armored and unarmored opponents in
a variety of combat situations. Though the manual was primarily focused on fencing,
there were also techniques described for other weaponry and also unarmed combat. As Alita
typically dispatches her foes with a mixture of martial-arts abilities and sword-fighting prowess,
her fighting style lines up well with this 15th-century inspiration.
Alita's favorite food
After being brought back into consciousness for the first time in centuries by Dr. Ido,
Alita is a blank slate. In her quest for self-discovery, she seeks to learn not
only who she is, but also what she believes and what she likes and dislikes. When Hugo learns
that Alita has never tasted chocolate before, he sets about remedying that immediately. So
after trying it for the first time, Alita declares that she now has a favorite food.
"I have a favorite food now! This is my favorite food."
It might look like a simple chocolate bar, but it's actually a chocolate shell packed
with a honey-peanut-butter filling and pecans. We know this because it was made by Robert Rodriguez
himself, and he even put together a tutorial explaining how to make your own at home.
He used a 3D-printer to make a custom chocolate mold in the shape of the Zalem symbol
found in the world of Alita, and he even brought homemade snacks to the cast of the film as well.
Throughout his career, Rodriguez's love of food has popped up in his work time and time again,
as evidenced by his long-running "10-Minute Cooking School" series that often appears
in the DVD extras of his movies. This has included making Texas BBQ for Planet Terror,
presenting his recipe for breakfast tacos for Sin City,
and explaining how to cook puerco pibil for Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
Long before the Alita: Battle Angel film arrived in theaters, the story was first told in manga
form all the way back in 1990. The first run of the manga series ran for nine volumes that were
released over the course of five years, and multiple sequel series followed. In English,
this manga is known as Battle Angel Alita, though the original Japanese title translates directly as
"Gun Dream." During an interview with BBC Radio 1, James Cameron described the switch from
"Battle Angel Alita" to "Alita: Battle Angel" as a forward-thinking shift with sequels in
mind. He suggested such potential sequel titles as "Alita: Fallen Angel" and "Alita: Avenging Angel."
In the manga and in the 1993 anime adaptation "Battle Angel," the main character's name wasn't
Alita at all, but rather "Gally." The name was changed for the initial English translation,
and it stuck around for the big-screen version as well.
There's another important difference in Alita's namesake that changed between the manga and the
film. In the manga, Dr. Ido names Gally after his cat who recently passed away,
while the live-action adaptation ups the ante and has Dr. Ido name Alita after his dead daughter.
There are a couple of moments in Alita: Battle Angel when little blue flames
emerge from Alita's body. Though never explicitly explained in the film, they
play an important role later on in the plot and serve an even more important purpose in the manga.
In the manga lore, these little flames are an extension of Alita's ability to
manipulate plasma. What might look like a flame is actually arc plasma.
These plasma powers contribute to Alita's fighting prowess by increasing her speed and
magnifying the power of her strikes. When she throws a punch, it isn't just a synthetic fist
striking her opponent, but also the destructive power of plasma energy.
Toward the end of the film when she finally gets her hands on the much sought-after Damascus Blade,
her arc plasma abilities come into play again. You might notice that the blade turns blue and
glows in her hand, something it never did while in Zapan's possession. This
is due to her arc plasma powers surging through the blade and supercharging it.
"Didn't exactly come with a manual, did you?"
Alita: Battle Angel was released in the United States on February 14, 2019, but James Cameron
bought the film rights to the manga all the way back in 2000. He even expressed interest in one
day adapting the story as early as 1995, before the release of Titanic. He was ultimately able
to buy the adaptation rights directly from the manga's creator for the sum of one million yen.
Cameron originally planned on directing the film himself, and he considered going into
production on Alita instead of 2009's Avatar. Of course, that didn't end up happening. One
key reason for holding off on Alita was that he didn't think CGI technology was
quite ready to deliver what was needed to do it properly. After the massive financial
success and major technological innovations of Avatar, Cameron again toyed around with the
idea of directing Alita, but his attachments to the Avatar sequels made that impossible.
Enter Robert Rodriguez, a friend of Cameron's for many years who had seen materials from
Cameron's earlier false-starts with Alita. He asked if the adaptation would ever happen
if Cameron was going to be busy with the Avatar franchise for the rest of his career.
So Cameron then offered Rodriguez the reins. As Rodriguez told Fandango All Access,
"Cause we'd been looking for things to work with, on together for years."
And this was a perfect opportunity for a collaboration.
The blue blood of the cyborgs in Alita might feel reminiscent of other sci-fi properties,
such as the inky-blue blood of the androids in 2013's The World's End.
But the blood in Alita wasn't always blue. In the 1993 anime adaptation Battle Angel,
the cyborg blood was instead a bright crimson. And although the manga was inked in black and white,
there was a clear emphasis on gore that didn't make it into the 2019 film.
In an interview with BBC Radio 1, James Cameron revealed that he couldn't be completely faithful
to the manga because of how gory it was, so they softened it for a PG-13 rating.
Even with this softening, Alita pushes the limits of PG-13, as there's plenty
of biomechanical destruction and dismemberment. The MPAA's ratings board has historically been
more lenient when assigning ratings to films with unnaturally colored blood,
so tinting the cyborg blood blue helped to avoid an R rating.
This isn't the first film directed by Robert Rodriguez to use unnaturally colored blood in
a bid to procure a more audience-friendly rating, as 1996's From Dusk Till Dawn featured green blood
for the vampires instead of red. That decision was made out of a fear of receiving an NC-17,
which worked out in the film's favor, as it ultimately secured an R rating.
Alita gets her first taste of motorball while playing in a friendly neighborhood skirmish.
In contrast to the later stadium motorball match, this first game was intended
to be executed with little-to-no CGI outside of the title character. This requirement incurred
a number of additional challenges, the first of which was finding the right talent to fill the
roles of the other players, who had to play this larger-than-life sport as if it was second nature.
So stunt coordinator Garrett Warren brought together the world's top professional
in-line skaters to execute the scene. In a making-of video, Warren, producer Jon Landau,
and members of the cast and stunt team discuss how the unique challenges of the scene were overcome.
Tall drop-in ramps and mechanical winches were used to mimic the speed and momentum
achieved by the motorized rollerblades of the film, which don't exist in real life.
The special effects of Alita: Battle Angel exist at the cutting edge of what's possible
with modern filmmaking technology. Having a large budget wasn't all that it took to pull
off the impressive visuals, as it also required the best design team and technology available.
Rather than scouring the industry for the best in the business,
the necessary resources came from a little closer to home.
James Cameron had already assembled the perfect design team to work on the Avatar sequels.
So when Robert Rodriguez got started on Alita, Cameron lent him the team
for a few months to work out the look, feel, and creation of the characters and
world. The production also made use of the motion-capture and 3D camera technologies
previously pioneered by Cameron for both the Avatar sequels and his documentary projects.
Cameron wanted a realistic "nuts and bolts" look to the cyborgs and the world,
while Rodriguez pulled from his experiences as a cartoonist to bring a lighter sense of
style to the film's look and feel. Ultimately, a happy medium was found with this design team.
The only human part of Alita's physiology is her brain, while the rest of her body is synthetic.
Even her heart is a pricey, centuries-old relic. This means that her body can be
swapped out with different cyborg parts tailored to specific tasks. In the film,
we see her in two main cyborg bodies. One is a civilian body initially built in part for Dr.
Ido's daughter before her death, while the other is a reclaimed berserker body built for combat.
There are also a few quick glimpses at another cyborg body in flashbacks.
"A warrior's spirit needs a warrior's body."
However, in the manga and anime, Alita has even more cyborg bodies that she can switch
between that are best suited to particular activities. Before the motorball match in
the film, Dr. Ido insists that Alita wear protective pads on top of her Berserker body,
but in the manga lore, Alita has a specialized body made just for motorball.
This motorball body has less destructive capabilities than her berserker body,
but it's much faster and more flexible. If Alita: Battle Angel ever winds up getting a sequel,
there's a chance we might see more of her specialized cyborg bodies.
"A-LI-TA! A-LI-TA! A-LI-TA! A-LI-TA! A-LI-TA! A-LI-TA! A-LI-TA!"
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