Alita: Battle Angel Trailer #3 Brings Motorball to the Big Screen

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Fox has unleashed a fresh trailer for producer James Cameron and director Robert Rodriguez's live-action anime/manga adaptation, Alita: Battle Angel. This is also the first trailer released for the film since it was pushed back from December 2018 to a February 2019 launch date.

A big-budget adaptation of Yukito Kishiro's Battle Angel Alita manga/anime (which was created in 1990), Alita: Battle Angel has been in development for many years and was once slated to be directed by Cameron, rather than Rodriguez. Cameron eventually handed the project over to the latter in order to focus all of his attention on getting his Avatar sequels off the ground, after Rodriguez put together an Alita script that convinced Cameron he was the right person for the job. The movie has since been delayed twice over the past year and was originally supposed to reach theaters back in the summer. By the look of things, however, its early 2019 release date will be the one that finally sticks.

Indeed, Fox has now released a third (and probably final) trailer for Alita online, and will presumably begin screening the trailer in theaters this weekend with its latest release, Widows, before attaching it to the various effects-driven tentpoles due to arrive in late November and December. You can check the new trailer out in the space below.

Like the previous Alita: Battle Angel trailers, this new promo focuses on the cyborg Alita's (Rosa Salazar) efforts to uncover the truth about what she is and where she comes from in the film, after learning that her "dad", Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), actually found her in a junkyard. The trailer also provides another quick glimpse at the movie's heroes and villains alike, ranging from Alita's human love interest Hugo (Keean Johnson) to the big bad Vector (Mahershala Ali), and characters whose alignments are not yet entirely clear, like Jennifer Connelly as the mysterious Chiren. Most intriguing, however, are the improved visual effects on display here, including those from the film's scenes involving Mortoball (a futuristic sport that, essentially, combines gladiator fighting with speed skating).

While Alita's CGI continues to look better and better with each passing trailer (including, Salazar's photo-realistic "manga eyes"), the film's story and characters (arguably) still come off being as flat and unmemorable here as they did in the film's original trailer. There's also the question of whether Alita is problematic in the way it seemingly erases any trace of the original property's Asian pop culture roots and features a cast nearly devoid of Asian or Asian-American actors, save for To All the Boys I've Loved Before's Lana Condor in a supporting role. That's not to say Alita: Battle Angel is shaping up to be a complete bust but, between all that and the film's delays, the odds aren't in favor of this one breaking the American anime/manga movie "curse", either.

Alita Battle Angel (2019) release date: Feb 14, 2019