James Cameron's next: Battle Angel Alita!

Well, Moriarty has ascertained that JC has been offered 300 Million for this. GOOD GOD.

Imagine what he could do with that amount of money, I know most of that will go into his bank account but still. Holy christ.

hmm... i'll believe it when i see it. cameron is a sneaky fellow.

he usually directs movies that he has written himself, though, so i'm guessing it wouldn't be an adaptation of any of the existing stories?

i wouldn't be surprised if alita in fact was his next project. he's always had a penchant for strong female leads in his films.

Can someone give a brief synopsis of what the hell Battle Angel Alita actually is? All I know about it is the damn title, and i'd like to be excited about this.

- Fate

It's about a bunch of deep sea explorers who discover the sunken remains of an alien technology. When a team of them get trapped inside and are attacked by forces unknown, the remainder has to figure out a way to save them using a couple of ROVs named Jake and Elwood.

It's essentially Dark Angel only cooler. It actually predates DA, I think that's where he got the inspiration for the show so he's going straight to the source.

It's about Gally, a small female cyborg found by Doc Ido in the dump surrounding Scrap-Metal City. Scrap-Metal City itself is a crime-filled, dangerous slum, surrounded by heaps of garbage dumped to the ground from Zalem. Zalem itself, is a floating city that is tethered to the ground just above Scrap-Metal City. Manufactured goods and supplies are shipped up the tethers from the factories of Scrap-Metal City, but the city itself remains tantalizingly out of reach of the common citizens of Scrap-Metal City, a vision of paradise floating above an earthly hell.


Doc Ido is a cyborg repair specialist. While searching the dump surrounding the city for usable cyborg parts, he discovers the head and torso of a ruined cyborg. Taking it home to his lab he is astounded to find that the human brain inside is still intact, shut down into hibernation mode. Using his parts and expertise, he restores a body to the head and awakens the girl. Eventually he restores her into a charming companion, one who is unfortunately, totally amnesiac about her previous existance, including how she ended up on a scrap heap, dumped from Zalem.

I’m excited about Cameron’s next project for a whole lot of reasons that I don't think are obvious some others.

Firstly, the Alita series is so dense with story, moments, characters and melodrama that it is impossible to believe that Cameron won’t have a blast in adapting it. From what I’ve read of the graphic novels the material on offer is right up his alley.

I also think Alita will be a movie that will show Cameron has evolved as a filmmaker.

I get the impression, and James Cameron might have said so himself in an interview, that his work on Dark Angel and the time and money restraints inherent with television has made him rethink or at least redefine what he can do on a smaller scale. A similar train of thought I think could apply when also acknowledging the documentary work he is coming off.

If he is getting that budget which is north of $300 million, I shudder to think what he can achieve with the sort of patience, economy and any other skills he might have developed with the experience from all the stuff I previously mentioned.

I’m one of the five people who is still able derive enjoyment from Titanic. It’s a film where he could separate himself from some of the macho-isms of his previous work. This, combined with work with Soderbergh on Solaris (or just his observation of that process, as the case might very be) would have to lend to growth in maturity as film maker in terms of character and the firm embracing of the fact that good filmmaking doesn’t always have to equal whiz-bang moments but can come from poignant moments of minimalism.

But in terms of whiz-bang, the thought of what has changed in the world of technology in the seven years since Titanic and what Cameron could possibly set a new precedent for is simply mind-boggling.

So says this fool anyway.

2006 is too damn far away.

I just hope to the heavens that he cranks down the melodrama...

There’s no good melodrama unless it is James Cameron melodrama.*

*Statement may be flawed.

The idea of a $300 million Battle Angel adaptation scares the hell out of me. I enjoyed the manga, and the new Last Order continuation, but... I don't know.

It seems to me like it would be going the Riddick route. I can see the first trailer confusing the hell out of people, and then the second more action-packed trailer making people want to see it just for fun. But I can't imagine it's actually going to be taken seriously.

Let me guess, the whole movie will be shot using blue lighting, like T2, Abyss, etc. Really stoked for this.

Isn't what men call melodrama, just drama that appeals to women. Like or dislike Titanic, it showed a filmmaker in full control of his audience, male and female, young and old.

From 1989 - 1997, Cameron led the way in terms of directing Effects film, yet they never became a showcase. He is a brilliant "BIG" filmmaker, and I'll see anything he puts out. I've heard the Cameron/Alita rumor for a long time, and I'll be tickled pink if that's his secret project.

I really don't care. I just want to see what he can do with today's technology.

Take care,
Chuck

You guys know that he's said that he'll be using his 3-D cameras for this, right?

Thanks, Chuck. I will.

I can't even imagine a big-budget sci-fi epic from the master. I will sit and constipate the glory the chosen one will bring to us. Still, I will believe it when I hear the words from the kings' mouth that this is a go.

...Which means that the film will only be watchable in a few hundred Imax screens world-wide. And even there, you'll risk getting a massive headache after 20-30 minutes.

I've watched Ghosts of the Abyss in a regular theatre with old school 3D glasses and it was awful.

3D is a gimmick anyway. Absolutely unnecessary.

Nope.

A while back there were reports about the system Cameron was developing for his next release. Yes it's the 3D system, but it would be in 3 different release formats.

IMAX 3D
Theatrical 3D
Standard theatrical

Most IMAX theaters are already equipped for 3D showings, but Cameron's major hurdle will be theatrical... I'm not sure what kind of conversion they'd need so that's going to be tough. But he'll still have standard release, so he'll have all his bases covered. More than likely, a few high class theaters will convert for 3D, but the majority wont, and they'll simply get the standard release prints (or digital projection).

Theatrical 3D sucks, so it'll be standard theatrical for me.

The thing is, even if there was a magnificent system developed, I was never sold on 3D. I don't believe it offers anything that 2D cinema can't. Unless you like people pointing crap at you.

And I don't think it justifies the cost of shooting a 3D feature and having 3D CGI.

I haven't yet seen any of the 3D systems so I can't comment on that, but I trust Cameron.

I'll probaby see it IMAX 3D first, just to get the full effect (if that's what Cameron thinks it best), then catch a 3D or regular theatrical.

300 million dollars is a ridiculous price for any filmmaker. this movie better not be worth that much.

Whenever James Cameron makes a movie, all the money is on the screen. When I saw T2 (remember when 100 M was alot of money for one movie?) I could honestly say that it looked like 100 million on the screen. Same thing with Titanic. The guy knows how to make big movies and as far as I'm concerned never let us down.

What amazes me though is that Peter Jackson created the entire LOTR trilogy for around 300-400 million with the last one alone looking like it cost 250 million. If James Cameron learned how to maximize the budget like PJ did the we are in for something incredibly awesome.

Cameron never takes giant fees for himself. That's why I'm always willing to cut him slack on his budgets. He puts the money onscreen, not in his pockets.

He deferred his entire salary on TITANIC to get it made, so stop busting his balls.

ROTK's SFX budget was significantly increased in post production. PJ basically had carte blanche. The original plan was around 300 shots. It got upped to over 1000.

250 million.....


It's closer than you think.

what was his salary for titanic? i thought it was like 10 million. thats really not alot when the movie cost like 200 million. so he basically put 5 percent back into the movie. im not ragging on the man. i just think anything like 300 million is ridiculous no matter who you are.

im still looking forward to the flick though. james cameron does some awesome shit. he's one of few directors who can do what he wants and when he wants.

"Whenever James Cameron makes a movie, all the money is on the screen."

Not all the time. Were all the deleted scenes for Titanic put back in or how about T2? I wish more filmmakers would stop filming a bunch of stuff only to cut it out later. They should have known from the scripting stage about what works and what doesn't and not waste the time and money.

Anyway I'd rather see this AVATAR thing. I prefer much more original work rather than another adaptation. Can't get enough of those. And 3-D is jarring to the eyes. Just an annoyance and distracting.

Think about it for a second. If they knew it wouldn't work they wouldn't have shot it. It's almost impossible to find out what scenes work, and how a film works as a whole until you've put together a rough cut. It's not like directors enjoy cutting most of these scenes either, especially when they have written them. Decisions have to be made, and even if you may miss a scene, it may hurt the film. It's a sign of a great director when he is able to remain objective and remove scenes that he loves because the final product is more important than your personal attachment. Next time you make a movie, use absolutely everything you shot -- just to prove your point.

Cameron is notorious for ripping off ideas for his movies from lesser known source material i.e. harlan ellison for terminator, marx brothers for titanic, Dark Angel had a lot of Battle Angel Alita influences from what i understand.

Its about time he just sits down and adapts something directly from the source.

I agree, and I love Titanic. And ZaneParry, count me in as one of the five people who still enjoy it.

he supposedly ripped some of dark angel from heinlens book friday. of course tarantino does it now a days and no one says nothing.

i still dont see terminator as a rip of ellison's stuff. i do believe he borrowed certain bits from ellisons tv work (outer limits) but they werent strong enough to be called rip offs (more like homages or out right borrowing).

i still dont see how ellison won that case and yet no one has sued the wachowski brothers yet.

Count me as one of the people looking forward to this. Cameron loves cp and has a long history with the genre. He wanted to make Burning Chrome and got involved with William Gibson for a while. Avatar. Now Alita.

I also agree that if there's one director who merits throwing that kind of money around it's Cameron. He will take the fx movie to the next level, and I'm sure whatever he does he'll have the best talent throwing themselves at him for a crack at it.

F-ing bring it!

Harlan Ellison stories include "Soldier", about a soldier in an apocalyptic conflict in the far future thrown back to our time; "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", about a military computer that becomes sentient and attempts to wipe out the human race, keeping a few alive to torment; and "Demon With A Glass Hand", which is an Outer Limits episode I haven't seen but apparently involves a cyborg assassin disguised as a human.

I'd say Ellison had a case. Not that I don't think Cameron blended these elements into something fresh and cool, just as the Wachowskis did and Tarantino does, and even Ellison said he liked the movie when it came out.

Anyway, yes, I'm extremely jazzed about the return of Cameron to big-budget SF. In a sense I think he was right to wait for so long--Titanic would have overshadowed anything he did in the past 6 years--but damn it, it's time. I've realized that theseslow, methodical filmmakers--Cameron and Tarantino, and before them, folks like Kubrick--almost always deliver something special, something that FEELS like it's been carefully worked on and taken to the next level. In an era where every frickin' movie feels like it was thrown together over a long weekend and rushed through post, that's always something to appreciate.

I agree, QT and Cameron may not be prolific but their work speaks for itself, in the end, that's all that matters.

"Think about it for a second. If they knew it wouldn't work they wouldn't have shot it. It's almost impossible to find out what scenes work, and how a film works as a whole until you've put together a rough cut. It's not like directors enjoy cutting most of these scenes either, especially when they have written them. Decisions have to be made, and even if you may miss a scene, it may hurt the film. It's a sign of a great director when he is able to remain objective and remove scenes that he loves because the final product is more important than your personal attachment."

Maybe directors shouldn't be so coked up on their own shit all the time. Not to mention those who don't even write their own movies. Maybe they should be more critical of themselves and stop living on their high horses.

Great Outer Limits episode. It was actually shot in the same building "Blade Runner" used for the final chase scene between Decker and Roy (The Bradbury). It dealt with "savior" robot travelling back in time because aliens supposedly wiped out humanity's future. The twist is the robot doesn't know he's a machine until the very end. He's actually carrying the very souls of the future within him. Alien soldiers are also continually sent back through time portals to capture him.


If you're gonna list SCI-FI literature which influenced Terminator, definitely include "Second Variety" by Philip K. Dick.





Reese's FUTURE-backs are very evocative of that short story. It's also about humans battling sentient machines in an apocalyptic wasteland.


But like Prankster said, the brilliance of Cameron is the way he synthesized, beautifully wrapping it all in his very own Christ/abortion metaphor. Even Ellison said it was ingenious storytelling.

Wasn't "Second Variety" the basis for Screamers?

Yeah.

But don't let that discourage you from reading the source. Great short story (written in the 50's before Dick became a novelist)

It's fairly obvious you've never made a movie. Try it sometime, and we'll see how many unecessary scenes are in it.

A script is nothing but a blueprint. Words. Sentences. Scenes. Sequences. Acts. It's all on paper. It may read well on the page and it may transfer to film just fine, but most of time, some of it just doesn't work, and there's NO WAY to know that until it's filmed and you can view it in the editing room... you cut the picture, watch it, and inevitably the movie will be too long, there will be unecessary beats, character moments or entire scenes. There's no getting around it, I don't care who you are.

Your ignorance is staggering.

I chose poor words and examples Colt for something else I meant entirely different now that I reread my earlier post. You reacted negatively because I said directors should know what works and what doesn't. It's true what you said that they don't know until they actually see it, but what I was thinking of is what's necessary to the overall story. I say this because movies are expensive and I see a lot of waste being produced because of time limit and then the director wants so much of this and a lot of that. And a lot of times the scenes they would have liked to have seen be put into the movie get cut, yet they don't see it put back into the DVD. And come on. You don't think that some directors think that they are hot stuff? That they are above all opinions?

And your arrogance is staggering.

Your opinions are incredibly uninformed and baseless. They reak of someone who's never been on a movie set, or around successful filmmakers.

Making a movie is incredibly difficult. It's like pushing a 2 ton rock up a steep hill inch by inch. On top of that, you're not even sure people are gonna like what you've done when the rock has gotten to the top of the hill.

Directors have to make thousands of decisions day in and day out for months, sometimes even years without hesitation. Even one wrong or bad decision can send the movie spiraling out of control and they'll never make another movie again... their careers are on the line.

They're responsible for hundreds of crew members who whine and complain after being on set for 15 hours because the coked out actor didn't want to come out of his trailer because he hated his lines and/or was getting blown by the hottie blonde day player. The director has to not only worry about THAT actor, but the entire cast, who are so fragile, one snicker from a crew member can send them into manic depression, crying, screaming, bitching, moaning...

Those things alone would be enough to send any normal human being running for the hills. And if that weren't enough, the director's gotta worry about the escalatiing budget. There's never enough time, the producer is getting murdered by the studio because he's afraid to tell the director he can't have the techno crane for tomorrow, so the director uses the techno crane and the producer gets yelled at, and the completion bond company sends their reps down to the set to shut the picture down because they think the director is out of control, but it's really his passive agressive line producer who never learned how to communicate properly and/or is too coked out of his mind to know the difference between a call sheet and camera report.

And that's just shooting the fucking movie. After all that shit's over... you go to the editing room. And view what you think is the worst footage ever shot in the history of film, so you go into your own manic depressive spiral, second guessing your own choices, while dealing with the idiot marketing people who want to market the picture as a slam-bank, e-ticket, summer roller coaster ride, when your movie is a complex character piece with a few actions scenes.

And here comes the test screening. The fate of the movie you've been laboring over for the past 18 months gets decided by some bum-fuck audience at a mall in bum-fuck Kansas, set up by the NRG, a group of people who turn the complex motion picture production process into a fucking street survey. Jethro, Billy Bob, and Blanch don't think your movie's got enough 'spolsions, so the studio orders a re-shoot, to get more... 'splosions cause that's what Jethro, Billy Bob and Blanch wanna see on May 15th.

The reshoots are a disaster because the stuntman is killed because you pushed him a little too hard, the studio is sued, and you're lucky you don't go to jail and get butt fucked by Jethro's cousin, Jeb. Meanwhile, the town is buzzing about the low test scores the NOT FINISHED movie is getting, the problems on the set and the hard to work with director (because he wants his movie made his way).

The movie opens and bombs, so back you go to shoveling mule shit.

And you're bitching about directors "living on their high horses"? Get a fucking clue.

What you need to understand is --

-- wait --

Fuck it. You're a douchewagon.

not to mention , directors are the ones making the movies , its their vision/choice of what the movie should be, who are you to say what they should keep and what they should get rid of?

With $300 million and the statement that he wants to "play with effects", I'm betting Alita is 100% CG.

Pixar->Final Fantasy->Matrix Revolutions/Return of the King->Alita->???->Virtual Cinema?

(Citing Matrix for the photo-real Smith/Neo models, even though the test footage looked better than what's in the movie, and ROTK for Gollum)

I'm 19. I wonder if I'll be there the day actors are replaced? When movies become more like video games? Knowing old folks and their attachment to the past, I'll be kicking and screaming the whole way.

"I can remember back when The Lord of the Rings came out.. we didn't need no stinking artificial-intelligence or virtual reality - we made do with old fashioned hand-animated 3D characters, if you can believe that!"

I'd start a thread about it, but I'm guessing it's been discussed here before.

no matter how good cgi gets, actors will never be replaced. just enhanced like andy serkis/gollum. it makes no sense to discard such a valuable aspect of the filmmaking process. as an animator i know its much more time consuming (and ultimately less effective) to 'conjure' an emotional performance, when all you have to do is get a dedicated actor and use them as the foundation for the animation. actors will always be more honest & authentic. this is especially true when it comes to photorealistic cgi. could a virtual thespian ever improvise? possibly, in the far future. but real actors can do it now. i'm ot a luddite, but we're talking about many successive watershed moments in ai for any of this to be realized.

here's where i get back on topic.... i'm really psyched to see this in whatever form it takes. jim cameron has been out of the game for far too long. when i was younger he was my favorite director, but titanic wasn't all that. i'd like to think he felt pretty good about his legacy and his competitive streak. and then all of a sudden, some furry kiwi comes along out of nowhere and kicks everybody's ass. and now jim realizes he's gotta represent. not to mention that he was probably just plain artistically inspired by lord of the rings, which has got to be the best form of flattery to pj.

i enjoyed the first book in the series and i'm curious to see where cameron goes with the concepts. it had crazy moments of ultra violence and cartoonishly psychopathic villains. if its faithful to the manga, it will be predominatly cgi. it could be 100%, de3pends on the interpretation....

edited for pondering

I think you're underestimating the pace that technology moves at. It wasn't too long ago we didn't have CG in movies at all. Now it's in almost every movie out there. And MASSIVE's just the beginning of AI driven movie characters. I think actor's will be replaced, but not entirely - I'm betting it'll move towards a more personalized event, where it's just you in a virtual movie, and you're the star acting out the part. That's what games are moving towards - it's a logical progression I think.

 

LOL

You necroed an eight year old thread for that?
 

Edited by chrknudsen - 6/3/12 at 4:15pm

Geez. I really need to start looking at timestamps before I read halfway through a thread.