Alita: Battle Angel (2018)

Love that part of the trailer.

Another movie doing very well with the audience yet the critics are giving it mixed reviews. Around 9/10.

they're a funny bunch these critics.

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Eh, I dunno, I kinda think your typical audience is far more likely to accept retreads and formulaic stories than the critics who have invariably had to sit through many more of them, and more often. That surely accounts for a good chunk of the instances in which they diverge, as opposed to just elitism, or whatever the implication there is meant to be.

Especially given how normal the critic score is (59%) and how insane the audience score is (4.6 out of 5). That latter number is definitely the "funny" one, unless you think this is a modern masterpiece.

I think it's about time for "Movie Critic Cards" , kinda like baseball cards. Let me know what your area of expertise or interest is, before I give you the time of day.



One of the local guys, big deal at the NCSA among other things, really shht on it. Said the script is horrible and even took the time to point out it was "James Cameron, the same guy responsible for Titanic" . I get the take, but how many people in the male 12-36 age demographic are gonna draw a line in the sand there.

Haven't seen for myself so have no personal judgement yet.

I don't either, I just really doubt that it's better than .

Worth noting that critics and moviegoers are not actually comparable: critics often have to review whatever's coming out, whereas moviegoers pick and choose what to see, which presumably increases the odds that they'll like what they're watching. So even if critics were randomly sampled from the population at large, you would expect them to have lower ratings than audiences, without even getting into issues of expertise.

Alita is an interesting case, it's my favorite Hollywood blockbuster movie in the last 10 years. It is a movie that lacks a deep level of subtlety in its dialogue and it is very fast paced.

People who read the original manga loved it, including professional critics like Theron and Zac from ANN. Thing is that Alita is the first major Hollywood movie that is an accurate adaptation of a manga, so of course, anime related people are going to like that kind of initiative to bring Japanese pop culture into the Western mainstream, the author of the manga is super excited his comic had a 200 million dollar adaptation and even said it was the best movie ever made .

I guess North American mainstream critics who did not like the movie (it has a 35% rating currently at rotten tomatoes among "elite critics", 60% among all critics and 93% among the audience) did not like it for the following reasons:

1 - It has too much plot in too little time, notice that critics like slower-paced movies as a rule.

2 - It lacks any "arthouse" quality in the sense that its direction is not artistically accomplished or very beautiful by itself. Compared to science fiction stuff critics loved like Mad Max Fury Road.

3 - It incorporates Japanese sensibilities in its writing since its very accurate relative to the manga.

Due to their exposure and drilling, critics tend to develop very closed minded sensibilities where everything that falls outside of a box of what they consider "good" is bad. Alita is a movie that is very out of the box of what these critics consider good, so they think it is "bad". Audiences, thanks to having less "drilling" tend to be more open to different stuff, as long as it is accessible. Alita is very accessible, being entertaining and fast-paced, it requires a little bit of more attention from the audiences than typical blockbusters which are very simple.

In my opinion, Alita is a big deal for Hollywood filmmaking for a set of reasons that are well explained in this video:

Rotten Tomatoes' critics tend to love very formulaic stuff as long as it follows Western sensibilities. For example, a standard run of the mill family CGI movie such as How to Train Your Dragon 3 has 96% rating, while the super formulaic superhero popcorn box Black Panther got a 97% rating.

Alita is very different from typical Hollywood movies, it is directly adapted from a manga which was serialized in a magazine aimed at Japanese salarymen, so Alita feels more like the first 3-4 episodes of a TV series bunched together into 140 minutes rather than a Hollywood movie. I have the impression movie critics are only open-minded regarding movies that fall outside the Hollywood style when they are arthouse movies that normal people hate.

A film that is accessible but it's a violent fast-paced genre movie that is different from Hollywood's typical product is exactly the kind of stuff critics hate.

Bohemian Rhapsody is similar to Alita in it's a discrepancy of critics to audience reactions: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bohemian_rhapsody,

Critics rating:
Bohemian Rhapsody - 61%
Alita - 60%

Audience rating:
Bohemian Rhapsody - 88%
Alita - 93%

Although I think both movies didn't do well with critics for different reasons.

How can you not like a movie full of Queen music? It's also a fairly good depiction of a real life "legendary" event, how Queen took control of Live Aid and got the donations pouring in.

Actually, I just thought about it now.

Alita and Queen's movie are very similar in one aspect: neither movie conforms to the identity politics ideology that dominates the mentality of those liberal-arts college types who write movie criticism. We are at a point when artistic value has is replaced by ideological conformity in movie criticism.

Bohemian Rhapsody did not press the idea that Freddie's homosexuality was central to his artistic development but only a personal issue, that is, it did not promote the idea that Freddie was DEFINED by his homosexuality which made a lot of critics very, very angry. (for example: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/b...-rhapsody-2018, direct quote: "The film's reluctance to deal with Mercury's sexuality is catastrophic because his sexuality is so connected to the art of Queen that the two cannot be separated out. Refusing to acknowledge queerness as an artistic force—indeed, to point at it and suggest that this is where Mercury went astray—is a deep disservice to Mercury, to Queen, to Queen fans, and to potential Queen fans. Genius doesn't emerge from a vacuum.")

Alita is the same: critics think its not good that it does not conform to identity politics which DEFINE individuals by their group identity, for instance, Alita is not portrayed as being DEFINED as a woman fighting against sexism, but as Alita, the deeply passionate cyborg warrior who happens to be a girl. Critics even complained about the fact her cyborg body looks good and that is bad because it "objectifies women", quoting https://slate.com/culture/2019/02/al...on-avatar.html, "Its racial and gender politics also feel a couple or three decades out of date: When Alita trades her first robotic body, originally built for Dyson’s dead teenage daughter, for a more battle-ready one, she also gains a supermodel’s curves, as if having a knockout figure were a strategic advantage in combat."

This video is also a good piece of evidence (also taking shots at Captain Marvel's upcoming movie):

Agree with this. Critics aren’t objectively reviewing based on the merits of a film rather on ideology. Another example would be the last Jedi which had contrasting positive reviews.

They are way out of touch. It’s a problem. Very damaging for a good film. On the flip side also damaging for cinema in general when highly reviewed films fall flat with audiences.

There certainly seems to be a trend of overrating films that have left leaning political issues.

Then with Alita what looks like clear underratng but for what reason I don't know.

They should get back to their base job which is rating films based on how good they are, keep it simple or they'll become more of a laughing stock than they are already, or irrelevant before long.

It must be exhausting to always be watching movies trying to find a way to connect it to how the elites are going to get theirs, or whatever. Pretty much the same kind of crusade as people who watch movies and look for problematic things.

You said a few posts ago you hadn't seen the film and don't have an opinion, however, which makes it particularly odd that you're willing to draw all these conclusions about how underrated it apparently is.

See earlier post about opinions diverging. They should. Critics have no purpose or value if they only reflect public opinion. They're supposed to watch and discern more, so being inherently suspicious when that happens doesn't really make sense.

Isn't it a problem when something bang average like Black Panther gets lavished with praise?

Yes I haven't seen Alita but I personally find mass audience reviews quite accurate.

Er, I guess? A bit?

This is kind of a non-sequitur, though, because I didn't dispute the idea that it mattered at all. I said that being suspicious of any divergence in audience and critical opinion a) doesn't make logical sense and b) isn't much different than scouring every film for political incorrectness. It's essentially the same thing: treating everything as a cultural battleground, which in turn exacerbates the very thing you're complaining about. It's buying into the idea that we can and should be fighting over films the exact same way we fight over policy.

I have to imagine we could find all sorts of exceptions to that. Unless you're failing to account for the fact that audiences routinely lovely whatever they see, and thus you need to account for that score inflation, presumably down to the self-selection bias I alluded to earlier.

Of course audiences love the films they see. They chose to go see them. Paid money, even. Critics have to watch everything, as I mentioned before. So that's two reasons you should expect critical scores to be lower even if they were completely even-handed in all ways: they have to watch films they didn't choose, and the mere act of being a critic would be pointless if it did not offer a more critical eye than everyone else.

I think my posts make it pretty clear that I'm not really disputing the idea that these things exist or can a bit of a problem (though clearly not a major one, and not one befitting all the attention and anger its getting). I'm disputing the kneejerk assumptions that pop up whenever this divergence exists, even though we should clearly expect a divergence.

This is doubly true when the divergence is so blatantly unremarkable, and when the audience score is so comically high. In order to imply something sinister is going on, you have to think that it's basically a modern masterpiece (per the audience scores), and that critics are punishing it for something (what? Not being overtly feminist enough?), and that this "punishment" consists of giving it just mostly positive reviews rather than insanely positive ones. That's goofy. That's a preexisting gripe looking for something to latch onto.

I don't think anecdotal evidence proves much, but even if it did, in this case these are clearly an artifact of Rotten Tomatoes' binary system. I don't find the How to Train Your Dragon films to be as formulaic as most family films, but they're well-made enough that most people would give them a rather than a if forced into that either-or. Metacritic, which is measuring a lot of the same people, has it in the mid-70s, and that's right in line with the average critic score on RT, too. So yeah, cite a simplistic number and you might get a simplistic result. The more detailed number is more accurate, even though it might not help make your point.

Because as much as I do like Queen, that doesn't mean I have to like a badly-made film just because it's about them and features songs I could just listen to independently.

As for the film's Live Aid recreation, the only thing that comes to mind about it when I see it mentioned is...this GIF.



On a related note, guess who dropped a video about this very film/genre recently...



Or you just hold onto a completely different set of identity politics to the critics in question. Besides, it's not like artistic value and political ideology are mutually exclusive concepts - the latter can definitely impact the former so it's not like professional critics are conformists for taking that into account while assessing a film.

"Did not press the idea"? They treated his bisexuality as a (quite literally fatal) character flaw that's often showcased in a negative light (most memorably when he meets his life partner by groping him), which definitely comes across as disrespectful of his legacy as a queer icon no matter how many grandstanding performances of Queen's greatest hits get crammed into the gaps.

There's more to considering a film's identity politics than just pointing out surface-level stuff like "sexism bad", especially considering how much of Alita's premise, world-building, and characterisation is rooted in exploring ideological concepts like class warfare and transhumanism (it's been interesting to see that some of the counterarguments I've seen against the aforementioned "new body" complaint have actually come about as a result of reading Alita's journey as an expression of transgender identity, which is better than just saying it's good simply because it doesn't acknowledge sexism in its movie).

What counts as "objective" reviewing, though? Every reviewer is different and assesses a film's merit through their own particular perspective, so I contend that there's either no such thing as "objective" reviewing or that the only way to review objectively is to just list facts about the film like "it was shot in digital" or "it's about a police officer" without comment, and that's just...boring.

How? Badly-reviewed films succeed all the time - the same goes for well-reviewed films that flop. I don't know why it's somehow the critics' fault that audiences don't 100% agree with their assessments of which films are good.

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