After a lengthy silence, James Cameron speaks about his apparently dormant adaptation of the manga, Battle Angel Alita. It’s a few years away, but the film may yet appear...
James Cameron's been talking about adapting the classic manga/anime Battle Angel Alita for years now, but following the success of that film with blue aliens in it, it had begun to look like such a project had withered on the vine. And with the director tied into making two more blue alien movies over the next five years or so, the prospect of a Battle Angel movie was looking even less likely.
According to Collider, however, it's just possible that a Battle Angel adaptation may appear one day, after all. On the campaign trail for cave-bound thriller, Sanctum, Cameron indicated that he still had a great deal of enthusiasm for Battle Angel, even though any work on its adaptation would have to wait for several years.
"I'm obviously going to be pretty busy for the next five years," Cameron said. "And so I had to consider, do I hand this project off to another director? And then I thought, ‘No, I love it too much.'...It's such a rich world. What I'm going to do is take the spine story and use elements from the first four books. So, the Motorball from books three and four, and parts of the story of one and two will all be in the movie."
Two years ago, Cameron indicated that the Battle Angel script and much of its production design had already been put in place, so there's an outside chance that, once Cameron's finished his duties on the distant planet of Pandora, his own take on the Japanese manga could be his next piece of work.
Created in 1990 by Yukito Kishiro, Battle Angel Alita (or Gunnm, as it's known in Japan) weaves a futuristic tale of a female cyborg and her friendship with the scientist who finds and repairs her. As her shrouded memory gradually returns, Alita works first as a mercenary, hunting down and destroying criminal cyborgs, and later becomes embroiled in the deadly gladiatorial game of Motorball mentioned by Cameron in his interview.
While some may be sceptical that a manga like Battle Angel could work as a live-action film, particularly in the hands of a western director, the themes and style of the premise are perfect for Cameron's technical style of filmmaking, and we've high hopes that his treatment of the story will be a watchable one.
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