The mecha sci-fi film "Alita: Battle Angel" supervised by Cameron broke 500 million at the mainland box office within 5 days of its release, which has surpassed the results in North America.
Under the PG-13 rating, the film is full of violent scenes such as amputation, beheading, and crushing. It can be said that director Rodriguez has done his homework for many years of making B-level films, which makes adults can't help shouting. happy.
However, in addition to being satisfied with the visual stimulation, the story of this film is really unsatisfactory, especially for fans of the comic "Gun Dream" , it is easy to have a feeling that the screenwriter is lazy when adapting——
The relationship between the characters is ambiguous, the love line of the male and female protagonists is difficult to empathize, the newly added family line is superfluous, the background of the characters is not introduced at all, and the characters are simplified, which makes the villain have a mentally retarded sense of doing evil for the sake of doing evil, etc.
In the 1990s when Yukito Kijo created "Gun Dream", many Japanese animations were trying to convey a very complex thinking about the world:
Animated movies such as "Aguila" and "Ghost in the Shell", TV versions such as "Evangelion", including the sci-fi comic "BLAME!" with a huge and scary world view...
Their observations of the world are often not divided into good and evil, but more dialectical and cruel, which is why they can be conferred gods and attract countless die-hard fans.
In this respect, Americans are as naive as teenagers, and their frantic pursuit of universal values is like a baby.
So in the comics, what are the plots that were killed by Kashen and Luo Dao, but are quite important to the story?
Bassey-kun will take you to take a look-
1. Boss Gruishka wants to kill Alita because he loves her
In the film, the world is divided into two layers - the city of Salem in the sky, and the scrap iron city in the ground.
The story takes place in the scrap iron city. Every day, Salem throws away a lot of metal garbage like defecation, and this scrap iron city full of violence and chaos has developed its own social form based on these garbage.
In the comics, Gruishka was thrown into the toilet by his mother and flushed down the sewer with his feces, and survived tenaciously.
Later, Nova gave him a maggot-like mechanical body (instead of the twisted spine in the movie), which is a metaphor for his life.
The movie shows the scene where Gruishka brings Alita into the sewer world, but does not give the villain's "bright moment".
When he gained great power, hatred was the theme of his existence, and he kept killing people and doing evil things. Because no one can beat him, he is alone and fills his loneliness with more kills.
At this time, Alita appeared, and her hatred for him made him feel his existence——
"When no one answered me, like when I died in a canal. That's when you showed up. You hated me, you broke me, you burned my soul!"
In the comics, Gruishka died in the sewers. Before he died, he told Alita that he would finally wait for the one who could end his life.
The scene of the battle is a light ball created by Alita with plasma, and the maggot Gruishka dies in a radiance, even a little holy.
Later, a bounty hunter said that there was once a man who passionately pursued Alita and was torn to shreds by her, referring to Gruishka.
What this villain reflects is the overall order of the apocalyptic society, and the living conditions of people under that order. It is the establishment of a worldview, not just a stereotypical perverted villain as shown in the movie.
2. Why does the hero want to go to heaven so much?
The most entertaining thing about watching the movie is the awkward love between the hero and heroine, such as "I will give you my heart", followed by "Is it very exciting just now", such lines are really hard to figure out .
In fact, in the comics, it is not an exaggeration to say that Alita has unrequited love for Hugo, because for Hugo, he is always obsessed with going to Salem, the city of the sky, and he has no nostalgia for everything in the scrap iron city. .
Rodriguez did not explain why Hugo wanted to go up by any means. Perhaps in his opinion, it is the normal state of scrap iron city that everyone wants to climb up.
In fact, Hugo once had a dreamer brother, who was intent on going up and built a hot air balloon regardless of the law, but was reported by his wife on the day of takeoff, and then killed by the bounty hunter. (Scrap City has a "no-fly" law)
So he wasn't actually fascinated by the city in the sky, he just wanted to escape this scrap iron city where even birds can't fly.
The only way to escape is to die, except to actually go up.
3. The story of the slasher's revenge
Another villain in the film, Ed Skrein plays the Damascus knife bounty hunter Zapan.
It can be seen that the director spent a lot of money on the shape of this character. The Buddha head and metal texture on his prosthetic body are impressive, but his personality is still thin.
There is actually a tragic story about him.
Zapan has a beautiful and kind wife with whom he provides food for refugees in the square. But after being cut off by Alita, Zapan became neurotic and grabbed his wife's head in an emotional outburst .
Nova later rescued him, separating his brain from other organs and surviving on something like a computer panel. (similar to Qilian in the film)
Later, he was also fitted with the body of a Berserker, and became the first villain who could hang and beat Alita.
In the process of watching, I often forget that these strange-looking steel monsters have brains, and they are actually human beings.
In the worldview of "Gun Dream", the body can be trampled and discarded at will, and as long as the brain does not die, it can be replaced with various mechanical prosthetics.
Therefore, an iron bucket on the side of the road, a pillar, may be a person. There is a very profound thinking about the boundaries of human beings by Yukito Kijo.
4. There are other cities above Salem
The heavenly city of Salem is not actually suspended in the air. There is a tube above Salem, pulling it from a higher place, and at that higher place, there is another city in outer space called Jerusalem. .
Although the people of Salem represented by Nova have powerful technology and power and control everything in Scrap Iron City, they are actually more like slaves than the people on the ground.
It turns out that the people of Salem are a group of people who have no brains, and all their memories are stored in chips.
And the whole of Salem is a large-scale human laboratory for the Jerusalemites, which is used to create controllable, rational, and emotionless people. It is farther away from the concept of "human" than the prosthetic people in the scrap iron city.
5. Gunmen's Dream
Why is the original book called "Gun Dream"?
Gun literally means axe, artillery, metal weapon.
The "dream" did not appear until the end of the comics. By then, Alita had experienced the death of too many people around her and faced a powerful enemy alone.
Nova made Alita fall into the "self-nuclear dream" (a kind of artificial dream that can make up reality based on people's memory and subconscious), in the dream, Alita is a good girl, and no one is dead. Because she was too happy, Alita once believed that the dream was the real reality.
In fact, in the comics, Alita's name has always been called "Gary", only in this fake dream, her name was changed to "Alita", and this name is directly called in the movie.
Think about it this way, Cameron is playing a big game of chess, maybe the entire movie "Alita: Battle Angel" is just a "self-nuclear dream".
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