SDCC 2018: Alita: Battle Angel Footage Presentation Recap

During Comic-Con International 2018 in San Diego, 20th Century Fox held a special presentation for the upcoming release, Alita: Battle Angel. Director Robert Rodriguez, star Rosa Salazar and producer Jon Landau were all in attendance to talk about the production.

It was a bit strange this event was not actually held at Comic-Con. Instead, the event was held at the Regal Theater at the Horzon Plaza. This was, for all intents and purposes, a Comic-Con panel, but it wasn’t actually held at Comic-Con. It was a bit of a strange choice, but Fox opted to hold it offsite.

The presentation first featured the debut of the new trailer that recently debuted online the following day. Producer Jon Landau came out and introduced the footage presentation, which showed some extended clips from the film. Battle Angel Alita creator Yukito Kishiro also provided a video introduction for the presentation and shared his thoughts on the production.

Lightstorm has actually been developing Battle Angel for many years. The company first licensed the project I believe in 1999. So it took almost 20 years for the movie to finally make it to the screen. That’s a pretty long gestation period.

One scene from the footage showed Alita (Rosa Salazar) waking up in Dr. Dyson Ido’s (Christoph Waltz) clinic. Landau revealed that Ido gave Alita a cybernetic body he originally built for his paraplegic daughter, who passed away before he could have her use it. After finding Alita’s body in a junkpile, Ido essentially adopts Alita as his new daughter.

Ido and his nurse help Alita adjust to her new cybernetic body. Ido reveals that Alita’s human brain was found fully intact. However, Alita has no memories of her past. Waltz gives her an orange to eat. The very innocent Alita first tries to eat it with the peel still on before Ido takes it off.

The next sequence shows Alita eating in a market for the Scrapyard while Ido is running an errand. Alita befriends a stray dog and meets a courier named Hugo (Keean Johnson). In this scene, she also notices a bounty notice for a cyborg that’s apparently murdering and mutilating hung woman. This notes bounties for Hunter Warriors, which are this world’s version of bounty hunters. A sentry tank then shows up and almost smashes the poor dog. Alita then rolls into save what’s obviously a CG dog model and assumes a fighting stance. Hugo is obviously impressed and smitten with Alita, and Ido then introduces the two, stating that Alita is new.

Another sequence then shows Alia following Dr. Ido in sequence. Dr. Ido appears to be following and stalking a young woman, making Alita believe that Dr. Ido is perhaps the person responsible for the murders. Dr. Ido starts setting up his large hammer, which fans of the manga and anime will recognize. In fact, this scene looks it was pretty much adapted straight from the anime version. After Alita intervenes, she realizes that Dr. Ido is in fact the person who was going after the cyborg assailant. Just like in the source material, Ido is moonlighting as a hunter-warrior. The woman reveals herself as a deadly bladed cyborg, and two other cyborgs show up, and one who is quite massive.

Alita then proves she has some innate fighting skills and defends Ido from the deadly criminal cyborgs.

A later sequence shows Alita, Hugo and some of his friends exploring the ruins of a derelict spaceship from a war from hundreds of years ago. The ship is partially underwater, so the humans can’t get into it, but Alita can. She’s able to walk through the water into the derelict and the technology of the ship appears to be responding to her. In the bowels of the ship, she finds another body. This is a body that was built for battle, and Ido does not want her to use it.

The final sequence shows a battle between Alita and a large, berserker behemoth cyborg who she encountered in the earlier scene with Ido. Alita is clearly angry after Ido refused to let her become a hunter-warrior, and she’s taking her anger out on this cyborg. He uses these vicious, metal whip-like appendages from his fingers. Alita is able to dodge most of his attacks. It definitely looks like the film is capturing an anime and manga type of aesthetic in terms of the motion and action sequences. The sequence ends with Alita diving toward the cyborg through his metal appendage whips.

After the footage presentation, Robert Rodriguez, Jon Landau, Rosa Salazar, and Keean Johnson came out for a live Q&A session. Rodriguez talked about the process of becoming the director for the project. Originally, Cameron was attached to direct it, but he was so busy with the Avatar films, that Rodriguez was able to get the role. Rodriguez adapted the film from a very long 170-page script written by Cameron.

Additionally, Cameron wrote a lot of background material for the film that delves deeper into all the characters, concepts and backstory for the film. Rodriguez also expressed how all the technological advancements made through Cameron’s work and Avatar made this film possible. One of the more humorous anecdotes was Rodriguez talking about meeting Cameron decades ago when he was making Desperado. Rodriguez told Cameron about using a steadicam for the production, and Cameron replied, “A steadicam? That’s nice. I took a steadicam apart to build a new one.” Landau addressed a fan question how the production incorporated motorball from the later Battle Angel volumes and incorporated them into the first movie because they didn’t want to wait to use motorball.

Alita: Battle Angel also stars Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein, and Jackie Earle Haley. Alita: Battle Angel arrives in theaters on December 21 in 3D and IMAX.