Hacker Cinema
Alita: Battle Angel
2019 · Film · 122 min
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
ActionScience FictionAdventure
When Alita awakens with no memory of who she is in a future world she does not recognize, she is taken in by Ido, a compassionate doctor who realizes that somewhere in this abandoned cyborg shell is the heart and soul of a young woman with an extraordinary past.
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6 comments on Hacker News
I haven't seen these mentioned yet: Galaxy Quest, The Fifth Element, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Oblivion, Tron: Legacy, Mission to Mars, Pacific Rim, Bicentennial Man, Alita: Battle Angel (some of these may be PG-13)
Treasure Planet and Titan A.E. are also good animated movies, although Treasure Planet is more science-fantasy.
I'd also second Back to the Future, Contact, Interstellar, Gattaca, October Sky
I’ve been here for 7 years now. The best way to describe San Francisco is that it feels like living in a cyberpunk utopia.
Alita Battle Angel, the movie, is almost exactly how San Francisco feels.
There are actually 2 cities. San Francisco, the tech town, is booming like crazy. New highrises and shiny skyscrapers are coming online almost every month. Areas that were barren wastelands when I moved here in 2015 are now bustling with new construction, street level businesses, full of upper middle class rich people running to and fro enjoying their lives.
The skyscrapers are fast encroaching on the other San Francisco, the poor and troubled city. They’re squeezing homeless people, drug addicts, etc into a smaller and smaller area. In some neighborhoods the concentration of shanty towns and “bad elements” is so high it looks and feels like a slum. Because that’s what it is.
Look at the actual numbers though and, at least officially, it’s not that bad. A city of ~800,000 residents has ~8,000 people living on the streets[1]. Around 1%, same as the ratio for USA as a whole with 580,000 homeless people[2].
What has changed during the pandemic is that these homeless people became more visible because while the upper middle class retreated into working from home. Now that people are coming back to the office, the city is again filling with commuters and the “undesirables” are slowly retreating back to wherever they were hiding before.
As others have said, lots of downtown businesses shut down due to lack of foot traffic. Because few people actually live downtown. Hopefully that gets restored as commuters come back.
Another way to sum up San Francisco is that seeing a person shooting up on the street is normal and seeing a Tesla is about as remarkable as a Toyota Corolla.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/New-data-shows-fewer-people-are-homeless-in-San-17176319.php
[2] https://theweek.com/briefing/1013082/living-on-the-streets
Their success might be the main reason I no longer go to the movies. I like sci-fi action movies like Starship Troopers, Terminator, Alita: Battle Angel, Total Recall, Avatar, The Matrix and such.
But these days no one seems to care for such products. What makes the big bucks seems to be super heroes made by disney. Would have been fine had they not have completely taken over the market now.
Yes, I'm an old fart and movies/TV is targeting the young population. Totally normal. But am I just old and bitter, or is this superhero trend just marketing? I think it's mainly the latter.
SIGGRAPH is the ACM's special interest group on computer graphics, held annually. This SIGGRAPH course talks about how path-tracing / raytracing is used in production movies, including examples from some pretty big blockbusters (Avengers Infinity War, Endgame, Capt. Marvel, Spiderman: Homecoming, Alita: Battle Angel...)
"Makes you wonder what life will be like for children 50 years from now, and how that would compare with today."
I cringed watching the new ALITA: Battle Angel movie, (Spiritual successor to Avator, directed by James Cameron). There was a teen romance section where the android and hot guy went through the tropes (riding on the back of his bike hugging tight, sneaking into his bedroom, watching him put on a tight fitting shirt)
it was weird because in Japan they are intensely lonely with people paying for surrogate GF's etc... and the robot industries are starting to develop 'romance' robots.
The best movies I saw this year were Bohemian Rhapsody (Critics: 61%, Audience: 87%) and Alita: Battle Angel (Critics: 60%, Audience: 94%). Maybe Rotten Tomatoes should be looking into how their critics are reviewing movies instead of banning "trolls"? If you read some of the critic reviews for the movies I mentioned, they are equally tinged with cultural and ideological opinions.
I think this is why conservatives are so up in arms about this movie. The majority of critics lean left and give high ratings to movies that align with their values. But when conservatives attempt to promote their own opinions about a movie, it's censored because "trolls". At this point, I give more weight to an army of fans, or haters, than a small group of critics.
It's also interesting how the NY Times, New Yorker and The Atlantic will write an essay afterwards that give "nuance" to the details of these types of events. Typically with a liberal bias.