Tag: SF

Fallen Sun: The Great War, by Harule Stokes

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆ ☆ ☆½

While not perfect, I think this one will probably end up sticking in my mind longer than most of the books I read. For one, it helps being a stand-alone and complete work, rather than the first of a multi-volume set. While I understand the rationale behind the latter – that’s where the bread and butter of writing income is made – it was refreshing to get a beginning, middle and proper end, without a cliff-hanger or opening for sequels. It was also different in content, rather than being yet another book which drops fantasy creatures like elves or vampires in a contemporary setting. I’ve seen enough of those this year, thankyouverymuch.

Instead, this takes place on a planet in the late stages of a brutal war between the Northern Alliance and Keynosa. Both sides have developed artificially-enhanced super soldiers, known as Fingers of God (FoG) or Guardians on their respective sides. It’s a brutal process, which few survive, and even those who do, risk an eventual collapse into psychosis. Beyond that, the two sides have different approaches: the Northerners exploit technology, while the Keynosians use biological weapons, in particular transforming the planet’s flora into lethal agents. After a long struggle, the Northerners are making a push for victory. However, their opponents are now also using their technology against them, which could potentially tip the balance of the conflict back to Keynosa.

The protagonist here is Jocelyn Martinez, a former teacher who is now a FoG. Her closest allies in the force are Ophelia, another FoG who is beginning to crack at the seams, and Patricia, a sniper who is still human. Like all soldiers – on both sides – they’re treated like mushrooms by their leaders. For instance, it turns out the anti-psychotic drugs FoGs need to take, interact badly with RX, the weedkiller sprayed in vast quantities to negate the Keynosian bioweapons. It’s hardly as if the FoGs need such problems, above and beyond mere survival. Yet as the end of the war approaches, the question looms: what do you do with  ultimate soldiers once peace breaks out. Making matters worse is Frank Sun, a FoG who went violently insane previously, but has now been released back on to the battlefield for the last push.

Initially, it’s all somewhat confusing, with much not immediately explained. It’s worth persevering, as Stokes does a very good job of getting inside Jocelyn’s head, and depicting the apparent contradictions therein. She’s capable of savage brutality, and the horrors of war are certainly not glossed over; yet Joceleyn is also tremendously loyal and willing to put herself in harm’s way for her comrades. The story also does a good job of switching perspectives, although the heroine encountering the “enemy” and finding – what a surprise! – they’re not so bad, was rather too obviously handled for my tastes. Fortunately, both the book and Jocelyn achieve redemption with a rousing final battle, and it’s almost enough to make me wish this had been another “Part one of” book. Almost…

Author: Harule Stokes
Publisher: Wave One Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book.

Exile

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★★
“Planet rock”

Space freighter pilot Jason (Sheridan) has his craft hijacked, and is forced to crash-land it on a deserted planet. Blinded and alone, things look grim for him, until he’s fortunate enough to be found by android Reyna (Guzzetta). She’s the product of a maverick genius, who took refuge on the planet, but recently died: she needs Jason, as the systems which power her require a human presence in order to operate. And he needs her – in particular, her advanced combat skills – in order to protect him, both from the planet’s hostile fauna, and the hijacker’s pals, who have followed him down to its surface. Yet, is Reyna entirely trustworthy?

This is especially shaky at the beginning. Maybe the CGI might have passed muster when this came out in 2008 (key word: “might”). The decade which has passed has not been kind to them, and you’d expect better from a remaindered PS4 game nowadays. Initially, the story is no great shakes either, especially with Jason’s blindness apparently little more than a slight inconvenience. He navigates his way round the unfamiliar landscape with the alacrity of a well-equipped bat, and seems to have little trouble breathing an atmosphere every other human requires a respirator to handle. Apparently, “you get used to it”, according to a throwaway line late in proceedings.

Then there’s the monster roaming the planet. It’s a good thing its only prey is blind, because… let’s just say, speed is not a strength. By “roaming”, I likely mean “shuffling slowly around.” On one level, it’s more than a bit crap, a bargain-basement knock of the Alien. On the other… it’s kinda endearing, simply by nature of being so inept: something Conway seems to realize, showing it only in quick cuts, close-ups and partial angles. We never get a decent medium-shot, probably for good reason. Throw in the proliferation of other people sharing the director’s surname in the credits, and it’s clear this is a professional production in little more than intent.

Yet, it has some interesting ideas, even if the interplanetary warfare described in the opening voice-over is notable by its almost complete absence. Guzzetta is actually decent in her role, with a physical presence which reminded me of Pollyanna McIntosh. It’s a role where her artificial, stilted and slightly forced performance (whether deliberate or not!) works for the character. The second half feels like a considerable improvement, when a rescue mission lands in search of Jason, and Reyna realizes her power source might be about to be taken away from her. If Conway had not over-reached himself and his available resources so aggressively in the first half, this could potentially (again, key word: “potentially”) have been a small cult classic.

Instead, while I’d like to applaud ambition in any film-maker, this feels like someone biting off an entire buffet more than they are capable of chewing. The results turn out to be similarly indigestible for the viewer.

Dir: Mike Conway
Star: Brian Sheridan, Heather Lei Guzzetta, Tiffany Sinclair, Jake Bass

Alita: Battle Angel

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★★★★
“Mechanical Pixie Dream Girl.”

Depending on your definition, this is perhaps the most expensive action-heroine film of all time, estimated at more than $200 million before tax incentives. Given the fate of live-action adaptations of manga in the West, most recently Ghost in the Shell, this was always going to be a risky investment, even with the name of James Cameron, the most successful movie-maker in history, attached as a producer. At one point, people were predicting a bomb of Mortal Engines size. While Alita seems to have escaped that fate, it’s going to have to do very well in both China and Japan, the two remaining territories, if it’s to turn any kind of profit, never mind start a franchise.

That’s a shame, because this is a solid, well-made piece of science-fiction, which does a particularly good job of creating a massive, epic world on the cinema screen. Rodriguez has been squeezing every penny out of his budgets since El Mariachi, and while there may not be much apparent overlap between Alita with Shark Boy and Lava Girl, the latter franchise was excellent training for RR in meshing computer graphics with actors. Sin City also laid similar groundwork, and helped set up the director with the chance to go big or go home. And there’s no doubt: Rodriguez went big. This was my first cinema trip of 2019, and was fully justified.

Having recently read the original manga, I was struck by how faithful the film was to most aspects. Right from the get-go, with Doc Ido (Waltz) finding the shattered remains of Alita (Salazar) on the scrap-heap below Zalem, there were shots which could have been story-boarded by the graphic novel. [Again, something Rodriguez also did in Sin City] Ido, in particular, looks exactly like I imagined him, and the same goes for Vector (Mahershala Ali), the shady power behind the scenes in Iron City, as well as Zapan and the rest of the bounty hunters.

The story is generally quite faithful, too. After her rescue, Alita tries to recover her past memories, becomes a bounty-hunter, falls in love with human boy Hugo (Johnson), takes up the brutal sport of Motorball, and experiences personal tragedy. However, the order of the events is shifted: in the manga, the tragedy is what spurs her entry into the Motorball arena. The film also adds Ido’s ex-wife, Chiren (Connolly), a character who was not in the comics, though does appear in the OVA. Here, they had a disabled daughter named Alita, who was killed by one of Ido’s Motorball goons. It’s a rather clunky subplot, which doesn’t add particularly much, beyond explaining from where Alita v2.0’s body came.

There has been much debate over Alita’s eyes, which have been CGI-increased in size to an extent rarely if ever seen in a live-action film. Of course, she’s a cyborg, so whatever. However, it is still something of a distraction, even though it appears they’ve been toned-down in size from early trailers, where it appeared her eyeballs would have occupied most of her brain’s frontal lobe. The eyes are one of the hardest things to get right with computer graphics, and when it isn’t, the results can be horrible, as with the resurrected Peter Cushing in Rogue One. This is better, and at some moments does enhance things, basically acting as a megaphone for Alita’s feelings. However, it also plays into the film’s main weakness: an apparent lack of genuine emotion. I’ll circle back to that a bit later.

As a spectacle, this is grand, offering sweeping vistas of a future world, densely populated with people, things and those in between. As an action movie, it works pretty well too. The two best set-pieces are the bar-brawl where newly-registered bounty hunter Alita proves her worth to her colleagues, and the Motorball game, where everyone else taking part cares only about killing Alita. There’s a palpable sense of progression in her skills over the course of the film. Initially, she’s clearly raw and unfocused, but after she is paired with her “berserker” body… [Inevitably, it has been the subject of PC whining, about it looking ‘too feminine’] Hoo-boy. By the end, she’s a weapon on mass destruction, regardless of the opponent’s size.

And speaking of the end, one frequently-heard bit of criticism is that the ending is too “open,” apparently fishing for a sequel. I can’t say I felt that way at all. There’s certainly scope for more movies, apparently involving Alita going after the mysterious Nova. Yet the main thread of the film, involving Alita and Hugo, is definitively wrapped up. In comparison, say, to Marvel films, which almost inevitably have an in- or post-credit sequence blatantly signposting the next film, this felt conclusive. While there is perhaps need for a greater sense of escalation, or a bigger climax (that Motorball battle is trivial in its consequences), I’m largely baffled by complaints about the “lack of a genuine ending.”

As mentioned above, a more significant issue is that I hardly “felt” anything for any of the characters. Ido – stuck between paternal instincts of protection and a desire to allow Alita self-determination – perhaps came the closest. The relationship between Alita and Hugo is supposed to provide the film’s emotional engine. But between the former’s CGI make-up and the latter’s generic blandness, it doesn’t make much of a dent. There’s a scene where she literally tears out her heart and gives it to him: everyone, including the film itself, seems faintly embarrassed by the whole incident. Worse still – minor spoiler – the movie even goes so far as to kill a dog, without generating more than a blip of impact. Somewhere, John Wick shakes his head, sadly.

I was initially concerned about the PG-13 rating – not least because the first trailer before the film was for UglyDolls [an animated movie “about acceptance, diversity, joy and friendship” according to its site]. I needn’t have been: this is more From Dusk Till Dawn Robert Rodriguez than the Spy Kids version, with a gleeful approach to the semi-mechanized carnage. For I think it helps on the censorship front, that most of the carnage in inflicted on cyborgs, who are largely able to take a licking and keep on ticking. The manga was heavily into black market spine-ripping; here, it’s mostly limbs, which is slightly more kid-friendly, I guess.

In the end, this is just about everything for which I could have hoped. While I don’t necessarily agree with all of the artistic choices, the positives greatly outweigh the weaknesses. Although this is a low bar (hello, Speed Racer), it’s certainly the best manga/anime adaptation to come out of Hollywood. It’s a world I’d love to see explored further: whether Rodriguez and crew get the chance to do so or not, will remain in doubt until the final box-office figures arrive. Fingers crossed.

Dir: Robert Rodriguez
Star: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Keean Johnson, Jennifer Connelly

Zombies Have Fallen

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★★
“Cheap at half the price.”

It’s not often that a film cost less to make, than the television set on which I watched it. But it appears this was the case here, with the budget reportedly coming in at five hundred pounds. No, there’s not a “thousand” missing from that. £500. What you get is probably not too far from what you would expect for that – some of the aerial photography and locations do appear to represent good value for money. Budget isn’t the real issue here though. This British film’s main problem is the drastic shift in story for the final third, when it suddenly morphs, for no reason, from a SF/thriller, into a full-on zombie apocalypse which the makers have neither the budget nor the talent to depict.

The heroine is Kyra (Parkinson), who was captured while a toddler by Raven Health, who are intent on developing and exploiting her latent psychic abilities. Probably close to 20 years later, she is broken out of their facility with the help of an activist bounty-hunter, who sends her into the care of one of his proteges, John Northwood (Heath Hampson). But the company head, Raven (Richardson) won’t let his asset escape easily, and dispatches a hunter of his own, Max (Gardner), to bring Kyra back. After about an hour of the chase, Kyra shows up at a wedding just over the Scottish border in Gretna Green and turns the entire congregation into zombies with her talents. 

What? Yeah, it was as abrupt as that, and the remainder of the film is your typical zombie bashing action. I do have to award a bonus half-star for the semi-automatic bagpipes, which double as a flamethrower. Laughed like a drain at that, and it’s the kind of dumb invention at which low-budget films can excel [see the early works of Peter Jackson for good examples] Unfortunately, the zombie effects and actors are awful; while the depiction of Kyra’s telekinetic powers is not exactly top-shelf, it’s somewhat hidden by the editing. If the randomly selected locals, pretending to be undead (or bad mimes, it’s hard to tell), had been also better concealed – such as behind a mountain – we’d all have been better off.

I substantially preferred the earlier sections. Parkinson is not unsympathetic, as the heroine struggling to come to terms with her powers (though if she has been kept locked up all the time, how did she apparently learn how to drive?), and Hampson comes over like a low-rent version of Liam Neeson. If the film had kept down that route, it would likely still not have been “great”, by any reasonable standard, but could certainly have been adequate. Instead, we’ve got something which looks almost as if it was slapped together from two entirely different films. Any redeeming qualities are largely trapped behind a severely questionable title (really, if you’re going to ape another movie, you can pick a far better one than London Has Fallen) and even more dubious cover artwork.

Dir: Sam Hampson
Star: Tansy Parkinson, Heath Hampson, Tony Gardner, Ken Richardson

Prodigy

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★★★★
“Hannibal Lecter’s kid sister, crossed with Carrie”

This small-scale production – a cast of little more than half a dozen, and one location, not counting the park scenes which bookend it – packs a wallop significantly above its weight. Psychiatrist Jimmy Fonda (Neil) is brought into a military facility by an old friend, Olivia (Andersen), to interview a young girl, Ellie (Liles), who is being held there. To avoid pre-judging her case, Fonda deliberately avoids reading the documentation about her with which he has been provided. But the stringent security precautions (“In the event the subject escapes the restraints, drop to the floor and cover your head”) under which she’s held, should give him a clue that this is far from a normal nine-year-old. If it didn’t, the conversation with her which follows certainly does.

For Ellie is incredibly bright, and completely sociopathic. Turns out she killed her mother, and also possesses freakish paranormal talents of telekinesis, which is why she’s locked up in this military facility. However, her wilful rejection of all authority has led those in charge – Colonel Birch (Palame) in particular – to the conclusion that euthanasia is the only option available, given the threat she poses. Olivia, who still believes in Ellie’s humanity, called in Fonda as a last hurrah to prove the young girl is salvageable before she is put down. Ellie, however, is having none of it, and seems intent on embracing her fate. Is this just a facade, or is she as incorrigibly dangerous as the authorities believe?

With such a low-key approach, a lot is riding on the performances of the two leads, and both Neil and Liles hit it out of the park. For a film which, for the great majority of the time, is nothing more than two people talking to each other, it’s remarkably engrossing to watch the two fencing for intellectual dominance. The chess game which they play is perhaps rather too obvious a metaphor for what’s going on here, yet it remains fascinating throughout. Even the slightly stilted and artificial nature of Liles’s performance – par for the course in almost any actor of her age – works for the character, because we’re unsure to what extent Ellie is, indeed, delivering a part she has decided to play.

The effects are generally similarly low-key, but used effectively to enhance things, from the first glimpse we get of Ellie’s powers through to the higher-tier unleashing of them. You could argue that the end is predictable; however, the way the set-up is constructed, there are really only two ways this can logically end. Either Fonda succeeds. or he doesn’t. Your mileage may vary as to which you think is more plausible, and whether or not the film-makers agree with you. I’ll confess we differed in our opinions, yet the journey there was still more than entertaining enough to allow me to shake hands and part on very good terms with the film.

Dir: Alex Haughey, Brian Vidal, Nathan Leon
Star: Richard Neil, Savannah Liles, Jolene Andersen, Emilio Palame

PULSE: The Trial by R.A. Crawford

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

The synopsis starts, “It’s been 100 years since the inter-galactic organization known as PULSE intervened to liberate the women of Earth. Now purged of its male population, the women have embarked on a journey to take their place in the all-female cosmic society.” Wait, what? That seems quite the “previously…” to skip over completely. It is a lightly-sketched universe, and one which perhaps raises more questions than it answers, not least the implication that every solar system has the same concepts of “male” and “female” as we do.

Anyway, taking that as read, the spearhead of this trans-galactic Amazonian army are PULSE, which is short for the Planetary Union of Life-form Salvation and Emancipation. Becoming a PULSE officer is not for the faint of heart, requiring years of training, which culminate in the infamously brutal final test of the title. In this case, the graduating class are dropped on an undeveloped planet, and have to make their way across its surface, to where a ship is programmed to depart at a preset time. But quite intentionally, it’s a thoroughly unforgiving landscape, to the point of lethality. Every step seems to bring a new threat, from native fauna through deliberate traps to the worst of them all – the Huntress, a PULSE dropout whose apparent mission is to ensure the final graduation ceremony can take place in a phone-booth.

After the initial couple of chapters set the scene, it’s almost non-stop action once we reach the planet’s surface, as we follow the paths of a (dwindling) number of candidates. The main focus is on two aspiring PULSE officers, Stella and Faye, who have become a team over their training, using their respective strengths to buttress each other’s weaknesses. But how will they cope after being separated? And what about the other candidates, such as top of the class Miriyada, or Kandis, who was curiously absent for most classes?

It’s a bit odd how some of the women seem keen on sabotaging other candidates. If it were “first 10 to finish graduate”, this might make sense, but everyone who reaches the ship passes, and I’d have said you’d want to encourage co-operation among potential officers. The level of bitchy backstabbing seen here, seems more like high-school than a military institution. There are also a few occasions when Crawford doesn’t have a very good handle on describing the action. For instance, a fight on the side of a mountain takes place; beyond that, I’ve still no real idea what was going on. And it might have been nice to take advantage of having a galaxy to work with, and add more diversity to the candidates; they all seem a bit… humanoid.

On the other hand, I can’t argue with the pace at all: this is one of the most page-turning stories I’ve read in the last year. I wanted to know what happens next, and the clear sense of “anyone can die at any time” created a genuine sense of threat for the remaining characters. The strictly gynocentric approach here leaves no room at all for romance – the bane of the literary genre as far as I’m concerned – so I appreciated that. These positive aspects did a good job of countering the flaws noted above, and although the ending is less cliff-hanger than brick wall, I’d not be averse to seeing where things go from here.

Author: R.A. Crawford
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, available through Amazon as an e-book or paperback.
Book 1 of 2 in the PULSE series.

The World of Battle Angel Alita

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With the release of Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel scheduled for February next year, I figured now would be a good time to take a look at the origins of the character. Where did she come from? What is the world she inhabits like? And what might we expect from the film?

The character was created by Japanese manga artist Yukito Kishiro, with the first installment appearing in Business Jump magazine, late in 1990. The 52 episodes plus an epilogue were then collected into nine volumes, and the story is available in that format, both in Japan and translated into English for a Western audience. There have been some changes made, beginning with the title: in its homeland, the series was known as Gunnm, which translates as “gun dream” [something hinted at by the heroine, who at one point says “I was probably a gun or something in my previous life”]. Alita is known as “Gally” in the original version, and the city hovering over her home town was originally Salem, rather than Tiphares. I’ll be using the English language names.

It takes part in a post-apocalyptic version of North America; later installments have said the timeframe is the 26th centure, beginning in the year 2533. The elite have left the surface of the planet, and live in the flying city of Tiphares. Everyone else is still on the ground, supplying the city with all its needs. One of those is Ido, a cyberdoctor exiled from above, who finds a cyborg head in the scrapyard lying beneath Tiphares. He gives it a body, and calls her Alita. Her memories are all but gone; what she does remember, however, is how to fight, being skilled in ‘Panzer Kunst’, a legendary form of martial arts. This stands her in good stead, as she becomes a bounty hunter, tracking down and killing criminals in and around the scrapyard.

There have been two (or perhaps three) subsequent comic-book incarnations. First was Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, originally published from 2001-14 in Japan. Then came Battle Angel Alita: Holy Night and Other Stories, though this was a collection of four side-stories – hence the “perhaps three”! Most recently, we had Battle Angel Alita: Mars Chronicle (2015-17). Two of the volumes from the first incarnation were adapted into a pair of 30-minute OVAs (Original Video Animation), released in June 1993. Rumblings of a live-action version have been around almost as long, with James Cameron securing the rights to the comic in 1999, having been introduced to the property by Guillermo Del Toro. By the mid-2000’s, a script had been created, but after developing the project in parallel with Avatar, Cameron decided to devote his efforts to that instead, and Alita went on the back-burner.

The massive success of Avatar led to Cameron committing to not one, two or three but four sequels, with releases dates planned out as far ahead as December 2025. Needless to say, that meant he would not be working on Alita any time soon. In 2015, he gave Rodriguez the script to rework, and was reportedly impressed enough by the result, then to hand over directorial control as well. The results are likely to be somewhat different from Rodriguez’s other works, where he typically does the cinematography and editing as well as his directorial duties. Here, those tasks have been delegated, a nod to the scale of the production. At a reported figure of $200 million, it’s not far off the budget of every other Robert Rodriguez movie combined.

It does not appear to have been a trouble-free journey to the big screen. When the first trailer appeared in December 2017, it came under heavy criticism for the enlarged size of the heroine’s eyes. While a standard feature in much of anime, seeing it in a “live-action” production was clearly unsettling to many people. It was notable that, by the time the second trailer arrived in July, adjustments had been made, and the reaction was considerably better. However, by that point the film had already undergone its first change in release date. Originally scheduled to come out on July 20, in February, it was pushed back to December 21.

But in September, Fox moved the release date again, this time to Valentine’s Day, 2019. This seems to have been a decision to back out of a crowded December market, including Aquaman and new movies from the Spiderman and Transformers universes. Moving it lessens the competition, giving it a couple of weeks before Captain Marvel is released. It’ll also become the first foreign movie after Chinese New Year, which may help its prospects there. That’s now almost eight months it has been pushed back, so you can understand some nervousness among fans. Especially given how much is riding on this.

For Alita: Battle Angel will be the most expensive action heroine film of all time, easily surpassing the $160 million cost of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. [I exclude The Force Awakens, as more a Star Wars film with a female lead, than a “true” action heroine film] That, of course, was the final entry in a series which had already proven its worth at the box-office. The market for live-action adaptations of anime out of Hollywood has also been shown to be precariously soft, most recently and obviously by Ghost in the Shell. If Alita reproduced that movie’s performance worldwide, it would not even cover its production costs.

If it flops, this would be a serious setback to future entries: we would potentially be back at the days of Catwoman where received wisdom was that actresses couldn’t carry an action flick. Right now, all we can do is keep our fingers crossed, for to this point, there have apparently been no test screenings of the full movie by which it can be judged. 18 minutes of various scenes was screened at Comic-Con International in July, and reports at that time said “the movie is going to be a combination of the manga and the OVA with elements of the ‘motorball’ storyline.” Let’s take a look at both of those incarnations, and see whether we might be able to learn what the film may contain.

Battle Angel Alita, by Yukito Kishiro

By Jim McLennan

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆½

I used to read a lot of comics and graphic novels. But when I moved from London to Arizona in 2000, I all but stopped. There are still boxes in our basement, unopened since then, filled with my comic collection. Rare have been the forays into that culture since, beyond the occasional volume of Dirty Pair, for review purposes. Certainly, nothing as extended as deciding to re-read this in advance of the anticipated release of Robert Rodriguez’s live-action movie. Initially, I feared I had bitten off more than I could chew, when I realized the nine-volume series was a total of over two thousand pages of content. Maybe I should have started reading it before mid-October?

In the end, the release date for the movie got pushed into next year, and I blitzed through the comics at about a volume per day, in virtually my usual reading time. I’d forgotten how pacy comic reading can be: if there’s no dialogue, you scan the panels quickly. It’s not as if you stop and admire them, or worry about what exactly is being portrayed. The intent is almost for the visual aspect to go from the page into your subconscious, so you get a visceral “feel” for what’s happening. That’s especially true for something as heavily action-oriented as this, and Kishiro has an amazing flair for it (not least in the area of sound effects!). If you look at an individual frame, you might not know what’s happening; yet put them together, and almost magically, it becomes a coherent flow.

However, there’s still an amazing amount going on in terms of story-line and universe-building. You can easily see how the feature film will only be able to cover perhaps one-quarter of the series. I presume it will begin with the origin story, in which Ido finds the head of Alita in the scrapyard beneath the floating city of Tiphares, and gives it a cybernetic body. He’s a part-time bounty hunter, only to find out quickly, the combat abilities of his new charge far surpass his own. Unfortunately, she has little or no memory of her prior life; where she got these skills and how she ended up in the scrapyard is only revealed well into the series.

The second volume has her both falling in love, and discovering the pain which love can bring. She is smitten by Hugo, another young orphan of the scrapyard, who is working hard – albeit in some very dubious ways – to raise enough funds to buy a ticket up to Tiphares. When he discovers the truth about his situation, he cracks – and a bounty is placed on his head. The end result is romantic tragedy of a high order, and also drives Alita away from Ido. That brings her into the middle arc: motorball, a superviolent pastime popular among the scrapyard inhabitants. This occupies the third and fourth volumes: Alita climbs the sport’s ladder towards the elite players, and ends up facing off against its brutal champion, Jashugan. It appears this is roughly the arcs which will be covered in the film version, though I’m not sure how far they’ll get into the motorball thread.

The second half sees Alita head into the wastelands, in search of Desty Nova, like Ido another Tipharen exile. She has become an agent working on behalf of the floating city, and against the rebel group of Barjack, which is intent on (literally) taking down Tiphares. While this gives her access to help from above, the flow of data goes both ways: if one Alita is good, wouldn’t a dozen of them be better? Through Nova, she discovers the gruesome truth about the citizens of Tiphares, and her convenient amnesia is also cured, with Alita remembering where she came from, as well as finding out the history which led to the current situation on Earth. She’s left to make the ultimate choice: whether to destroy Tiphares or save it.

It having been more than two decades since I last read this, I’d forgotten almost all the details, so the twists and turns proved highly effective once more. There were several moments where I had to put the book down and just absorb what I’d been told, and Kishiro is good at telling the reader the essential information efficiently. However, it’s the action sequences throughout where he really shines, whether it’s the motorball contests, or the escalating series of battles in which Alita finds herself involved. For no matter how powerful she may become, there’s always someone bigger and badder – likely culminating in Den, leader of the Barjack rebels. Imagine a pissed-off half-horse, half-Transformer. Yeah, he’s like that.

While they certainly would not be cheap, there’s enough material here for a whole franchise of live-action movies, if the first one is a success (fingers crossed, though I’m not optimistic it’ll take in the half-billion or more needed for it to turn a profit). I’m really looking forward to seeing what Robert Rodriguez can do with the adaptation, on the largest cinema screen I can find. Hopefully his vision of Tiphares, the scrapyard and Alita is able to live up to the impressive world created by Kishiro.

Author: Yukito Kishiro
Publisher: VIZ Media LLC, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book

Battle Angel Alita, Volume 1
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 2
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 3
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 4
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 5
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 6
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 7
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 8
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 9

Battle Angel: The OVAs

By Jim McLennan

★★★½
“Sweet, yet too short.”

Watching this after having read the manga version, it feels like the anime version can do little more than scratch the surface of the world of Tiphares, in the barely fifty minutes it has to work with across its two OVA (Original Video Animation) volumes. The stories here, originally released in 1993, cover the first two section of the manga, and it looks like much of what we see here will also be included in the live-action film next February. Slightly confusing matters, is the way this uses the original Japanese names. So Tiphares becomes Zalem here, and Hugo is Yugo. Most oddly, the heroine is not called Alita – hence the absence of her name from the title – but Gally. To avoid further confusion, I’m going to be consistent with our other articles on the topic, and stick to the translated ones for what follows.

We see Ido (Kariya) discover the head of Alita (Itou), and almost before we can blink, it’s back to being fully functioning. He’s a part-time cyber-doctor, part-time bounty-hunter, and after Alita follows him – suspecting he’s a killer who is stalking the streets of the scrapyard – she ends up rescuing him from the real killer. She also meets and falls for Hugo (Yamaguchi), a young man desperate to get out of the scrapyard, by any means necessary – a fact that proves to be the source of his downfall in the second OAV. Not present in the manga is the character of Chiren (Koyama). Like Ido, she’s a refugee from Tiphares, who resent his cyber-medical skills and wants to prove herself superior. To do so, she rescues gladiator Grewcica and sets him against Ido’s creation, Alita.

For something a quarter-century old, the animation has stood the test of time well. This is notable in the first part, and especially the battles between Alita and Grewcica, which remain more than capable of getting the blood pumping. The look of the scrapyard and Tiphares have been transferred nicely. The colours feel like your imagination told you they should, from the b&w manga, and even the sound design adds to the atmosphere, both in Kaoru Wada’s score and the groans of the pipes connecting Tiphares to the scrap-yard.

The problem, I think, is a script which doesn’t have enough room to develop the characters and their interactions. Especially short-changed is the relationship between Alita and Hugo, which feels like it goes from zero to passionate love (on her side, at least) in no time at all. As a result, you’re left to wonder why she’s prepared to go to such lengths for him, though his eventual fate remains poignant – not least the addition of a little flourish at the end, where Ido and Alita send up a balloon in his honour. I probably would have felt kinder towards these episodes if I’d seen them before reading the original source material; as is, while solid enough, I can’t help feeling there’s something missing.

Dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi
Star (voice): Miki Itou, Shunsuke Kariya, Kappei Yamaguchi, Mami Koyama

Battle Angel: The OVAs

  By

★★★½
“Sweet, yet too short.”

Watching this after having read the manga version, it feels like the anime version can do little more than scratch the surface of the world of Tiphares, in the barely fifty minutes it has to work with across its two OVA (Original Video Animation) volumes. The stories here, originally released in 1993, cover the first two section of the manga, and it looks like much of what we see here will also be included in the live-action film next February. Slightly confusing matters, is the way this uses the original Japanese names. So Tiphares becomes Zalem here, and Hugo is Yugo. Most oddly, the heroine is not called Alita – hence the absence of her name from the title – but Gally. To avoid further confusion, I’m going to be consistent with our other articles on the topic, and stick to the translated ones for what follows.

We see Ido (Kariya) discover the head of Alita (Itou), and almost before we can blink, it’s back to being fully functioning. He’s a part-time cyber-doctor, part-time bounty-hunter, and after Alita follows him – suspecting he’s a killer who is stalking the streets of the scrapyard – she ends up rescuing him from the real killer. She also meets and falls for Hugo (Yamaguchi), a young man desperate to get out of the scrapyard, by any means necessary – a fact that proves to be the source of his downfall in the second OAV. Not present in the manga is the character of Chiren (Koyama). Like Ido, she’s a refugee from Tiphares, who resent his cyber-medical skills and wants to prove herself superior. To do so, she rescues gladiator Grewcica and sets him against Ido’s creation, Alita.

For something a quarter-century old, the animation has stood the test of time well. This is notable in the first part, and especially the battles between Alita and Grewcica, which remain more than capable of getting the blood pumping. The look of the scrapyard and Tiphares have been transferred nicely. The colours feel like your imagination told you they should, from the b&w manga, and even the sound design adds to the atmosphere, both in Kaoru Wada’s score and the groans of the pipes connecting Tiphares to the scrap-yard.

The problem, I think, is a script which doesn’t have enough room to develop the characters and their interactions. Especially short-changed is the relationship between Alita and Hugo, which feels like it goes from zero to passionate love (on her side, at least) in no time at all. As a result, you’re left to wonder why she’s prepared to go to such lengths for him, though his eventual fate remains poignant – not least the addition of a little flourish at the end, where Ido and Alita send up a balloon in his honour. I probably would have felt kinder towards these episodes if I’d seen them before reading the original source material; as is, while solid enough, I can’t help feeling there’s something missing.

Dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi
Star (voice): Miki Itou, Shunsuke Kariya, Kappei Yamaguchi, Mami Koyama

Battle Angel Alita, by Yukito Kishiro

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆½

I used to read a lot of comics and graphic novels. But when I moved from London to Arizona in 2000, I all but stopped. There are still boxes in our basement, unopened since then, filled with my comic collection. Rare have been the forays into that culture since, beyond the occasional volume of Dirty Pair, for review purposes. Certainly, nothing as extended as deciding to re-read this in advance of the anticipated release of Robert Rodriguez’s live-action movie. Initially, I feared I had bitten off more than I could chew, when I realized the nine-volume series was a total of over two thousand pages of content. Maybe I should have started reading it before mid-October?

In the end, the release date for the movie got pushed into next year, and I blitzed through the comics at about a volume per day, in virtually my usual reading time. I’d forgotten how pacy comic reading can be: if there’s no dialogue, you scan the panels quickly. It’s not as if you stop and admire them, or worry about what exactly is being portrayed. The intent is almost for the visual aspect to go from the page into your subconscious, so you get a visceral “feel” for what’s happening. That’s especially true for something as heavily action-oriented as this, and Kishiro has an amazing flair for it (not least in the area of sound effects!). If you look at an individual frame, you might not know what’s happening; yet put them together, and almost magically, it becomes a coherent flow.

However, there’s still an amazing amount going on in terms of story-line and universe-building. You can easily see how the feature film will only be able to cover perhaps one-quarter of the series. I presume it will begin with the origin story, in which Ido finds the head of Alita in the scrapyard beneath the floating city of Tiphares, and gives it a cybernetic body. He’s a part-time bounty hunter, only to find out quickly, the combat abilities of his new charge far surpass his own. Unfortunately, she has little or no memory of her prior life; where she got these skills and how she ended up in the scrapyard is only revealed well into the series.

The second volume has her both falling in love, and discovering the pain which love can bring. She is smitten by Hugo, another young orphan of the scrapyard, who is working hard – albeit in some very dubious ways – to raise enough funds to buy a ticket up to Tiphares. When he discovers the truth about his situation, he cracks – and a bounty is placed on his head. The end result is romantic tragedy of a high order, and also drives Alita away from Ido. That brings her into the middle arc: motorball, a superviolent pastime popular among the scrapyard inhabitants. This occupies the third and fourth volumes: Alita climbs the sport’s ladder towards the elite players, and ends up facing off against its brutal champion, Jashugan. It appears this is roughly the arcs which will be covered in the film version, though I’m not sure how far they’ll get into the motorball thread.

The second half sees Alita head into the wastelands, in search of Desty Nova, like Ido another Tipharen exile. She has become an agent working on behalf of the floating city, and against the rebel group of Barjack, which is intent on (literally) taking down Tiphares. While this gives her access to help from above, the flow of data goes both ways: if one Alita is good, wouldn’t a dozen of them be better? Through Nova, she discovers the gruesome truth about the citizens of Tiphares, and her convenient amnesia is also cured, with Alita remembering where she came from, as well as finding out the history which led to the current situation on Earth. She’s left to make the ultimate choice: whether to destroy Tiphares or save it.

It having been more than two decades since I last read this, I’d forgotten almost all the details, so the twists and turns proved highly effective once more. There were several moments where I had to put the book down and just absorb what I’d been told, and Kishiro is good at telling the reader the essential information efficiently. However, it’s the action sequences throughout where he really shines, whether it’s the motorball contests, or the escalating series of battles in which Alita finds herself involved. For no matter how powerful she may become, there’s always someone bigger and badder – likely culminating in Den, leader of the Barjack rebels. Imagine a pissed-off half-horse, half-Transformer. Yeah, he’s like that.

While they certainly would not be cheap, there’s enough material here for a whole franchise of live-action movies, if the first one is a success (fingers crossed, though I’m not optimistic it’ll take in the half-billion or more needed for it to turn a profit). I’m really looking forward to seeing what Robert Rodriguez can do with the adaptation, on the largest cinema screen I can find. Hopefully his vision of Tiphares, the scrapyard and Alita is able to live up to the impressive world created by Kishiro.

Author: Yukito Kishiro
Publisher: VIZ Media LLC, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book

Battle Angel Alita, Volume 1
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 2
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 3
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 4
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 5
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 6
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 7
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 8
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 9

Sheborg Massacre

  By

★★★½
“Australiens”

From the director of From Parts Unknown, and offering a similar pastiche of cult elements – in this case, alien invasion films rather than combining wrestling and zombies. It works rather better: Armstrong seems to have better restraint here, letting the entertainment value flow more naturally, rather than feeling the need to force his hip credentials on the viewer. Dylan (Duff) is a self-proclaimed anarchist, a rebel whose father is running for mayor. She and her pal, Emma (Masterman) get involved in a plot to liberate the inhabitants of a puppy mill, only to find themselves embedded in the middle of an alien invasion. It’s up them, along with geek Velma (Monnington) to save the day and prevent the cyborg queen (Wilson) leading the invaders from powering up.

This feels a bit like the very early works of Peter Jackson – Bad Taste in particular – with a spirit that sits somewhere between “can do” and “screw you.” The nods to other movies are copious, not least the poster (right), which is straight retro fire: Emma is an almost shameless clone of Dianne from Shaun of the Dead, while Velma, equally obviously given her name, is right out of Scooby-Doo. But the film takes these elements, and meshes them together into something a bit more than that. Not least, you’ll rarely find a B-movie with quite as many strong female characters on both sides of the script. I’d like to have seen more of the queen – she spends most of the film off-screen, operating through her minions. Yet those minions are no less bad-ass than the heroic trio of women fighting them, particularly the former puppy farm overseer, up against whom Dylan has to go on a number of occasions.

There’s a certain sweet spot which a film of this kind needs to find, located between taking itself too seriously and not seriously enough. You need to be aware of your own limitations, acknowledge them and work around these, and generally, this does a good job. For instance, what the film may lack in quality for its special effects (the mask on the queen is particularly half-assed), it makes up for in the sheer volume of blood, goo and alien slime which ends up hurled everywhere – not least over its characters! The action style is also interesting, with editing used well to enhance the impact of the fights, when it’s clear the skills of some participants are… limited.

It’s not perfect, certainly: you’ll still need a tolerance for low-budget cinema, and ideally a love for and knowledge of, the kind of content which is its inspiration. You may find the pacing uneven, especially in the second half, and certain elements just don’t work, such as the shoehorning in of a punk band whom, I can only assume, are present because they are mates with the director. It’s certainly not because they have any acting skills. However, it remains the kind of film which I’m prepared to cut significant slack, and after the underwhelming nature of Parts, I’m now highly interested to see what genre Armstrong mines for his next “neo-pulp” effort.

Dir: Daniel Armstrong
Star: Whitney Duff, Daisy Masterman, Louise Monnington, Emma-Louise Wilson