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Titanic Director to Make Battle Angel Movie
thelizman writes "Director James Cameron, who gave us the Terminator movies (I, II, III) , Aliens, The Abyss, and brought Dark Angel to the small screen will give us a new treat. According to AP, Cameron will direct a live action + cgi movie based on the Battle Angel Alita (GUNNM) book series. Slated for release in 2005-06, the movie will be available in 3D as well as 2D versions. Cameron will be using 3D technology developed for IMAX films to deliver the 3D versions (and on IMAX maybe?). Another twist is that the lead character will be CG, while other roles will be filled by live actors." Update: 11/25 22:42 GMT by T : Sunny Dubey writes "Terminator 3 was *not* directed by James Cameron. It was directed by Jonathan Mostow."
The Wikipedia entry is 4 paragraphs long but tells you NOTHING about the story. If you've have no clue what Battle Angel Alita is about, read more here.
The Abyss was my favorite movie for a long time. I absolutely loved it. And the Aliens were visually stunning (if lacking in story). But, what is this Battle Angel? And is it worth the Cameron touch?
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Funny how not even the Wikipedia article mentions what this series is actually about. I'm getting the feeling, from the write-up, that the movie is going to be more technophilia a la Final Fantasy (which, coincidentally enough, is just a re-hash of Cameron's Aliens with some Gaia / New Age junk thrown in to add spice). Isn't there already a live-action Evangelion in the works? I like anime well enough, but does the world really need a spate of live-action adaptations? Have we learned nothing from Fist of the North Star and The Guyver?
Also, speaking of CG -- I have nothing against CG in general, but the idea of a CG main character fills me with a vague boredom and distaste rather than excitement. As a gimmick, it already feels played out. Gosh, MORE distracting computer graphics in a movie, you say? More actors making wooden deliveries to green screens and teamsters waving flags for them to react to? Sign me up!
I would rather see CG used in the environment where it really thrives -- animated films. I don't mean that CG should try to emulate reality as closely as possible -- you just end up with The Uncanny Valley, and the animation will displease people without them ever being able to put a finger on why (it will just look "bad").
I think CG has tremendous potential to show us things that can't be emulated in real life -- and make it look better than it ever has before. I don't think re-hashing an anime title is really going to fit that particular bill. Instead, we see people attempting to make CG look as realistic as possible, which has the effect of making it both "unrealistic" (i.e. distinguishable from reality), and kind of banal. Why would I want to see an animated Jonny Quest jumping onto the back of a moving train, when I can see Jackie Chan do it for real?
A lot of animated shows have added CG to the traditional forms of animation, and seen some tremendous success. I'd rather see the technology go in that direction.
The Terminator franchise became property of C2 pictures and was directed by Johnathan Mostow.
This is a community of dorks and nerds. Who the heck thought "Director of Titanic" was going to get more attention than "Director of the Terminator movies." Hello! Titanic and is the kind of movie you go see with your girl friend and I don't think I need to discuss how few of us here have those.....
He will cover whatever gives him a license to make sweepign excessively dramatic CG shots. As fitting with Hollywood's nature, there will be a lot which is "gritty" but not much which is artistic. So we will get a Gally who knows Kung Fu, Ido knocking down waves of people with his hammer from lots of camera angles, but none of the coverage of Ido's desire to keep Gally "pure" besides a standard movie "master, I am ready to fight!" "you are not ready to fight!" sort of thing. We will get a "postapocalyptic" setting in which we see lots of twisted metal and a run-down bar at the edge of it, and lots of big evil robots for Gally to fight, but the true scope and extent of the Scrapyard or the nature of the dual civilizations feeding off of each other the city represents will go unexplored.
Basically we'll get a revisit of the future setting from Terminator 1, with some characters from Gunnm spit into it.
though he gave his blessing.
The quote I heard from him was along the lines of "at least they can't do to the Terminator franchise what Alien 3 did to the characters and story I created for Aliens." I guess that *might* be considered a blessing.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I highly recommend picking up an issue of this month's Wired magazine, which hit the shelves the other day. It's guest-edited by James Cameron, and focuses on exploration, from undersea to subterranean to outer space. There's an interview with Burt Rutan, and also an interview with a renown cave explorer/inventor who's designing a submarine to search for life on Europa.
...
Here's an excerpt from Cameron's intro piece, which I found to be quite powerful:
Space is a vacuum. There is, by definition, nothing there. When we talk about exploring space, we really mean exploring the objects careening around in space - planets, moons, the occasional comet. So space is a hurdle, an ocean that must be crossed to reach a destination. Unfortunately, for three-quarters of the space age it has been treated as a destination in and of itself.
The last time humans crossed space to a destination was the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. In the 32 years since, no man has seen, with his own eyes, Earth as that beautiful, solitary blue sphere, and - reality check - no woman has ever seen it at all. We've been only to low Earth orbit since 1972, and from that altitude of 220 miles, looking at the 7,900-mile-diameter Earth is like peering at a basketball with your cheek pressed against it. Yes, you'll see curvature, but you're not seeing the whole thing. We've spent 32 years "exploring space" in low Earth orbit. Exploring nothing. To stay in orbit you have to go 17,000 mph, or Mach 25. So we've spent three decades going nowhere fast.
It's taken people a long time to wake up to this fact, but we finally have. Now Exploration with a capital E is in the air again, in what will hopefully become some kind of renaissance. Eleven billion hits to NASA's Web site during the Spirit and Opportunity rovers' exploration of Mars is an astounding groundswell of support. NASA is still blinking in surprise, trying to figure out why people love the rovers yet care less about the construction of the International Space Station than a new interchange outside Cleveland. It is only now sinking in that one is exploration and the other is, well construction.
If the next step is to send humans to Mars, then we must reexamine our culture of averting risk and assigning blame. We don't need any miracle breakthroughs in technology. The techniques are well understood. Sure, it takes money, but distributed over time it doesn't require any more than we're spending now. What is lacking is the will, the mandate, and the sense of purpose.
Something interesting is happening right now as you're reading this. NASA is scrambling, under presidential orders, to prepare for a renewed vision of human exploration beyond Earth. They've generated a plan, and it's a good one. I've sat on the NASA Advisory Council for the past 18 months, which is surely the most interesting period since the Apollo days. NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe has fundamentally reorganized the agency. NASA is figuring out post-shuttle solutions to get people into orbit, how to do the heavy lifting to get big payloads (like interplanetary vehicles) up there, and all the other critical tasks to create human exploration space-systems architecture.
The public understandably asks how this will be paid for. The answer comes with some good news and some bad. The bad news is that space shuttle operations and space station construction and operations (in other words, current human spaceflight) is sucking up about $8 billion of NASA's $15 billion annual budget. The good news is that when the shuttle is retired (2010) and the space station completes its mission (2014), $8 billion a year will be freed up without adding a dime to the NASA budget. Over time, one funding wedge tapers, and the other widens. From 2014 to 2024, you've got a cool $80 bil to send folks to Mars.
The problem is that government projects are subject
This has been announced numerous times over the past, oh, four years or so. Cameron's wanted to do it for a long time, but each time it looks promising, it gets yanked away. I doubt he's even started a screenplay yet.
As far as making a movie of it, I'd hope they were planning more than one, as there's no way you can tell the whole story arc in two hours.
It deserves to be made into a movie, but it also deserves to be done right.
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IIRC, Cameron said he didn't think T3 should be made (hence he refused to direct it). He believed that Terminator 2 completed the Terminator story as he wanted to tell it.
Indeed, you can see in the wildly different styles of direction in T1/T2 vs T3 that James Cameron had no part in T3's production.
Also of note is that Arnie was refusing to play the Terminator again in T3 unless Cameron was the director. Ultimately, Cameron told Arnie to do the film but make sure he got an extortionate ammount of money for doing so.
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James Cameron isn't a good choice... we need a director that has worked with sci-fi movies involving cyborgs and dark futures, one that is known for using cutting edge CGI, and can do some emotional manipulation to draw in more non geek movie goers... wait a second....
Ironic. Daredevil was supposed to be one of the least self-absorbed characters in the Marvel universe - one who was always thinking of others. He made peace with his problem, and used it to help people - not because he was compelled like Batman, but simply because he was a good person. Affleck did a worse job than you thought, apparently, if he seemed self-absorbed.
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Let's recap the movies he's done, shall we. So far he has directed:
Piranha II (hey, everyone's gotta eat)
Terminator
Aliens
The Abyss
Terminator 2
True Lies
Titanic
He also wrote the script for the movie "Strange Days"
There are over-riding themes throughout all his films:
-Strong Female Character
-Use and misuse of technology
-The strength of human spirit in adversity
-Self sacrafice for the greater good
-The struggle of technology subsuming humanity
-The hubris of man who think (and usually a he) they have nature and technology under control
For anyone who has read the manga and watch all the James Cameron movies (especially the director's cut), it would be immediately obvious why James Cameron picked this project. As a matter of fact when I was reading Battle Angel I was saying to people that it felt like a James Cameron movie done by a japanese manga writer.
Battle Angel is not just another manga. Like Akira before it the books introduced many philosophical questions about humanity, and always asks many existensial questions. Those are the type of questions that were probed in James Cameron movies, even in Titanic. Rose was not just questioning her status as a woman in high society of early 20th century, she was questioning how she should live her life.
I have full faith in James Cameron. He is no fly-by-night fanboy. He is meticulous in the planning of his movies. I am sure he will focus on just one of the story arcs of Battle Angel. He is known to produce sequels, and he has already mentioned that he wants to "break up" the whole arc of Battle Angel if the box office would let him. I think that he's doing the main character in CG so he can really spend time on this project. There's no other way to keep a 200 year old cyborg girl that looks like 20 looking like 20 for 3 movies if it takes him 3-4 years for each movie. The 3 movie part is just my speculation.
For me, my vote goes to the Hugo story as the first arc because it's when the tone of the whole series begin to change and she starts to grow. But knowing what James Cameron has done he will probably do the Bounty Hunter story who was given the Imaginos Body by Dr. Nova that was wreaking havoc on the Scrap Yard. That story got all the elements of a good James Cameron movie.
"Battle Angel is a very real possibility and that's the film that I fully intend to direct, that I will direct - the issue is will it be the next film, or will it be the one after the next film? That's really all there is to it at this point. We've done a tremendous amount of design for the film, we're fine-tuning the script, it's just a matter of time."
Guess the question about when he's going to make it has now been answered. Anyway...
"What I like about it is that when we first meet Alita she's very young, she's sort of pre-pubescent in a way, and she actually matures throughout the story. I like that, that the development of her mind actually affects her physicality. There's a lot of really great things about it, and there's a lot of things - whether the artist really intended it or not - that I read into it, and so I think it'll be a good fusion of what Kashiro created and how I would do things."
Will it be faithful to the original manga?
"No, I don't really think that's possible. Not only is it not possible, it's not desirable. I think it's not possible because the manga is very discordant - it's not internally consistent, meaning sometimes she looks like one thing and has one set of abilities, and at the whim of Kashiro he'll go off on a different tangent. It needs to be fused and focused and given a centralised storyline. But the character will be very, very true to Alita as she is in the manga."
Motorball?
"Motorball might find its way into the second film - I definitely want to do more than one film. I want to create a world and a character that can go through at least one more film, possibly more. And that's not just for the usual financial reasons, it's just that I think there's a possibility for a real mythology here, so I feel that this is a good canvas to do something big that's got more scope."
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