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Honest Trailer - Alita: Battle Angel

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Alita: Battle Angel is the 306th episode of Screen Junkies comedy series Honest Trailers. It was written by Spencer Gilbert, Joe Starr, Dan Murrell, Danielle Radford and Lon Harris. It was narrated by Jon Bailey as Epic Voice Guy. It parodies the 2019 cyberpunk action film Alita: Battle Angel. The video is 4 minutes 2 seconds long. It was published on July 30, 2019 to coincide with the film's release on Blu-ray/digital. It has been viewed over 1.3 million times.

Watch Honest Trailers - Alita: Battle Angel on YouTube

"From a studio that didn't even make it through the 21st century, comes Hollywood's best adaptation of a manga yet, which, to be fair, is a really low bar to clear." ~ Honest Trailers - Alita: Battle Angel

Script []

From a studio that didn't even make it through the 21st century (shows the 20th Century Fox logo changing to a futuristic landscape and reading "26th Century Fox"), comes Hollywood's best adaptation of a manga yet, which, to be fair, is a really low bar to clear. (shows the posters for Death Note (2017), Dragonball Evolution, and Ghost in the Shell (2017), followed by Grandpa Gohan hitting Goku with a ki attack as a fart sound plays in Dragonball Evolution)

Alita: Battle Angel

Meet Alita, a cyborg with the eyes of a doll, the softness of a body pillow, and the heart of a MacGuffin.

Ido: You have a heart strong enough to power all of Iron City for years.

On the surface, she's the Internet's perfect woman: a sexy killer dumpster baby who's totally legal...

Alita: So I'm 300 years old?

...and will kiss you if you give her chocolate.

Alita: (tasting chocolate for the first time) Mmm... That is so great!

But underneath, she's got a hidden mission: cram a whole franchise worth of exposition into one short movie.

Alita: What's Final Champion? / Does anyone ever go up to Zalem? / What's outside the city? / What holds it up? / Why are there so many languages? / Whose body is this? Who am I? / Who has the power to do that? / What happened? / What's that? / Hey, what are those things? / What is that?

Ugh, we don't have time for this, Alita! Just... go watch Alita; it explains everything. (plays clips from the 1993 OVA Battle Angel)

Prepare for a film set in the 2500s, made with the best technology of the 2010s, that still plays out like it never left the 90's, where everyone is really into X Games, as scene after scene of Motorball dominates the run-time, but always feels like a skippable minigame in a Final Fantasy. (shows Tidus playing blitzball in Final Fantasy X) Nothing says "cutting-edge future world" like a rollerblade sesh with the boys! (plays clips of characters rollerblading in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, D2: The Mighty Ducks, and this film, ending on a freeze frame of Alita about to make a basket) Radudical!

But it's not all blades (shows Zapan handling the Damascus Blade), babes' blades (shows Alita pointing the Damascus Blade towards Zalem), babes made of blades (Nyssiana), and Blades-to-be (Vector); there are actually some great human actors in this movie... or at least, their disembodied faces (shows the CGI-heavy characters Grewishka and Zapan), as Jennifer Connelly spends the film being either vaguely menacing or vaguely helpful, Mahershala Ali spends it as a literal mouthpiece for someone else...

Vector: (distorted) So we finally meet, Alita.

Alita: Nova?

...and Christoph Waltz does some heavy lifting by making the phrase "Panzer-Kunst" sound cool --

Ido: The instinctive fighting technique you use... is Panzer-Kunst...

(snickers, then chuckles) -- and some literal heavy lifting by convincing the audience he could control a giant, rocket-powered hammer. (shows Ido using a rocket-hammer against Romo) Well, that's definitely how his assistant lost her arm, isn't it? (shows Nurse Gerhad with a cybernetic arm)

So gear up for the passion project that was supposed to be James Cameron's opus... till he dumped 600 pages of notes on Robert Rodriguez and went off to make Avatar sequels instead (a ScienceFiction.com article with the title "James Cameron Sent Over 600 Pages of Notes For 'Alita: Battle Angel' Including Plans For a Trilogy" pops up), with a final product that blends awesome robot-fighting, decades-old cyberpunk tropes, and suddenly ending on a shot of Ed Norton instead of bringing the story to a conclusion. Starring-- Wait, we're going to do that, too?! Urgh, that's frustrating!

Starring: Eye Robot (Rosa Salazar as Alita); Doc! Hammer Time (Christoph Waltz as Dr. Dyson Ido); He's Just a Skater Boi (Keean Johnson as Hugo); Pentium for a Dream (Jennifer Connelly as Dr. Chiren); Droid Rage (Ed Skrein as Zapan); Optimus Crime (Jackie Earle Haley as Grewishka); Hidden Figure (Idara Victor as Nurse Gerhad); Smithers! Release the Saws! (shows some cyborgs on a cargo tube getting sliced to bits by a giant spinning blade); and The First Rule of Zalem is You Do Not Talk About Zalem (Edward Norton as Nova).

Toy Story

The for Alita: Battle Angel was 'Toy Story.' Titles designed by .

The honest title for Alita: Battle Angel was 'Toy Story.' Titles designed by Robert Holtby.

You know, it's too bad this was the anime James Cameron got obsessed with; I mean, it's not bad, but why couldn't somebody have slipped him JoJo's Bizarre Adventure?

Joseph Joestar (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure): You made the wrong move, you stupid pig! (shoves his finger through a corrupt cop's nose, knocking out two teeth in the process)

That'd have been awesome!

Trivia[]

Honest_Trailers_Commentary_-_Alita-_Battle_Angel

Honest Trailers Commentary - Alita- Battle Angel

  • In the Honest Trailer Commentary, the writers revealed the original tag for this Honest Trailer was going to be that they wished James Cameron had discovered the anime Yuri on Ice. Writer/producer Joe Starr is a massive fan of Yuri on Ice. However, they decided to change it to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure because it is more recognizable.
  • Viewers frequently reference JoJo's Bizarre Adventure in comments on Screen Junkies videos featuring Joe Starr because a character's name is "Joseph Joestar."
  • The associated episode of Honest Trailers Commentary is particularly memorable because of the writers' shameless enthusiasm for doing Christoph Waltz impersonations, replete with terrible German-Austrian accents.
  • Screen Junkies have also produced some other Honest Trailers about Western adaptations of Japanese IP including Dragonball Evolution, Ghost in the Shell and Godzilla. See list of Honest Trailers for more.

Watch the full episode of Honest Trailers Commentary on YouTube

Reception[]

Honest Trailer - Alita: Battle Angel has a 97.2% approval rating from YouTube viewers. In her write-up on the Honest Trailer, Princess Weekes of The Mary Sue observed "Honest Trailers tackles the fun action-adventure elements of the film, with its sword fights, Xtreme sports, and sci-fi elements, with an audience that also turned Alita into their “cool girl” champion when Captain Marvel rolled around." Brian McGee of Egotastic observed "like many James Cameron projects, it [Alita: Battle Angel] over-explained things rather than trusting the audience to keep up. The film is now getting the Honest Trailer treatment from the folks over at Screen Junkies, and they can't help but bring up this particularly fatal flaw. They're also not terribly hard on the film, which is appropriate considering it's a difficult film to hate due to its earnestness. One area in which they really should have gone for the kill was with Alita's love interest, played by this walking charisma vacuum."

Sandy Schaeffer of Screen Rant noted "As much as the Alita Honest Trailer pokes fun at things like Alita's behavior and the elements of the film (namely, its motorball sequence) that feel oddly reminiscent of '90s pop culture, it also takes the time to highlight the movie's visually spectacular robot battles and familiar, but still fascinating cyberpunk themes. At the same time, however, it mocks the movie's attempts to set the stage for a live-action Alita franchise by essentially having Alita (Rosa Salazar) speak in exposition or ask plot and/or world-building related questions for much of the runtime. And like many a critic before it, the trailer also points out that Alita doesn't have a proper ending so much as it just stops and leaves it to a sequel to bring some actual closure to its story."

Production credits[]

Video thumbnail for Honest Trailers - Alita: Battle Angel.

Video thumbnail for Honest Trailers - Alita: Battle Angel.

Epic Voice Guy: Jon Bailey

Title Design by Robert Holtby

Written by Spencer Gilbert, Joe Starr, Dan Murrell, Danielle Radford & Lon Harris

Produced by Spencer Gilbert, Dan Murrell, Joe Starr & Max Dionne

Edited by Kevin Williamsen

External links []

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