Trailer
Plot summary
Iron City lies beneath Zalem, a wealthy city suspended in the sky, three hundred years after a war called the Fall. There Dr. Dyson Ido recovers the wreck of a female cyborg from the scrapyard, her human brain intact, and joins it to a spare robotic body. She has no memory of who she was, and Ido names her Alita. She befriends Hugo, who hopes to move up to Zalem, and he shows her Motorball, a sport played by cyborg gladiators. One night Alita follows Ido, and cyborgs led by Grewishka ambush them. With Ido hurt, she fights instinctively with Panzer-Kunst, a lost cyborg combat art, and drives the attackers off. Ido then admits he is a Hunter-Warrior, one of the Factory's bounty hunters.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- James Cameron brought in Robert Rodriguez to condense his own 186-page screenplay and some 600 pages of notes into a shooting script; satisfied by that work, Cameron then offered Rodriguez the directing job.
- Rosa Salazar went through five months of exhaustive martial arts training for the action sequences, learning Eagle Claw Kung Fu, Muay Thai and staff work, and James Cameron had the film pay homage to Bruce Lee through Alita's punching technique in a mirror scene.
- Cameron set the floating city of Zalem in Panama City, explaining that it is not floating but hanging from a space elevator, which would only work physically near the equator; Iron City was therefore designed with Spanish signage and Latin American architecture.
- For the film's London premiere in January 2019, Cameron and 20th Century Fox collaborated with Open Bionics to give a 13-year-old double amputee a pair of Alita-inspired bionic Hero Arms.
- Manga creator Yukito Kishiro called the adaptation "the greatest movie in the world", saying every viewing shows him something new and that the core part of his manga was brilliantly passed on to the film.
- Epic Stone Group, a Florida-based multimedia company, sued 20th Century Fox in January 2019 for trademark infringement over the "Battle Angel" name, saying it had filed the trademark in 2009 for computer games, action figures and other merchandise.
- In September 2020 fans petitioned the cinema chain Cinemark to re-release the film before the end of the year as a way to gauge public interest in a potential sequel, and Cinemark responded that it was considering the idea.
