Alita Battle Angel

I watched Alita Battle Angel last night with my wife.  It was pretty good, for what it was—a very Japanese cyberpunk movie.  The Japanese-ness of it was a challenge for both of us, by which I mean specifically the story structure left us unsatisfied.  I don't really like stories were nobody except the protagonist is actually really very good (well, her adoptive "father" was too, I suppose) and where everyone has to die and where the movie ends without actually showing the big showdown that they've been leading up to the entire movie.  My wife thinks that they were trying to set it up for a sequel; I think it's just too Japanese and that's how it was supposed to end.

Given all that has been going on online with this movie versus Captain Marvel, I'll be honest—I hoped it would be better.  It was good, but it's not going to challenge Captain Marvel, not matter how terrible Captain Marvel is.  How terrible is it?

Pretty bad, apparently.  Shockingly so, even.  Sure, sure—there's no doubt some "stick it to Disney, the media, Brie Larson, Rotten Tomatoes and everyone else involved in being an avowed enemy of regular white guys" going on here, so I still presume that it's not going to end up being that bad.  Is it going to be worse than Justice League?  Where they turned Flash into a really annoying, neurotic Jewish kid (seriously, whiskey tango foxtrot on that one), completely eliminated any tension when Superman showed up and easily defeated the villain that the rest of the team had been having a good fight with, etc.  Justice League actually wasn't a terrible movie by most accounts, but it was ruined by them dropping the ball late in the movie in a big way and making Superman simply be too OP to justify anybody else even existing at all.

It looks like not only did they do that with Captain Marvel, but they also cast a completely charmless and unlikable lead, and they also wrote no chemistry with her and her co-stars, and even worse, they set up the last Avengers movie to completely suck too.

Are there saner heads at Disney who can stop this train wreck at the last minute?  Not sure.  Maybe.  Probably not.



UPDATE!!!

Uh... what happened to all of the user ratings?  And even after purging tens of thousands of "trolls" (for values of "troll" that mean "saying something I don't want them to") they only got the score up a few points!  Hah!

Still, kinda funny to catch Rotten Tomatoes red-handed at trying to manipulate the audience score.