Alita: Battle Angel gets a second trailer that showcases improved visual effects and reveals more plot details for the anime/manga adaptation. The trailer follows the Alita panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2018, where several minutes of brand-new footage was screened.
James Cameron held the screen rights to Yukito Kishiro's Battle Angel Alita manga for several years and, in the filmmaker's typical meticulous fashion, put together hundreds of pages of notes for the film over that period of time. Ultimately, however, Cameron ended up handing the project off to director Robert Rodriguez while he focused his full attention on shooting his long-expected Avatar sequels. Rodriguez has since written and filmed his own version of the project and is currently in post-production on the movie, ahead of its December theatrical release.
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An official Alita: Battle Angel trailer was unveiled late last year, offering the first look at Rosa Salazar (The Maze Runner trilogy) as the film's namesake, complete with photo-real "manga style" giant eyes. The trailer further reveals Alita's fairy tale-esque origins in the film, showing how she is re-assembled by the kindly Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) after he uncovers her remains in a scrapyard. Fox has now released a second trailer that dives deeper into the film's narrative (including, Alita's backstory) and further explores Iron City: the futuristic metropolis where most of Alita takes place.
In addition to revealing more about Alita and her mysterious past, the new Battle Angel trailer introduces the film's big bads: a powerful Iron City citizen portrayed by Mahershala Ali (who actually plays two roles in the movie) and Deadpool's Ed Skrein as Zapan, the cyborg whom Ali's character (well, one of them, anyway) tasks with finding and destroying Alita. Cameron, Rodriguez, Salazar, and producer Jon Landau further answered questions about the film during an online Q&A that followed the Alita: Battle Angel trailer launch, but avoiding spoiling anything that hasn't been covered in the trailers so far.
Unlike the first preview, the second Alita: Battle Angel trailer also dives into the film's social themes and shows that Iron City's upper economic class exploits those (somewhat literally) beneath them. Cameron's sci-fi offerings past have typically had a clear political subtext (see also The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and especially Avatar), and Rodriguez doesn't appear to be shying away from that approach with his own version of Alita, either. As for Salazar's manga eyes: the effect looks better here than in the original trailer, no doubt thanks to the seven months of additional rendering that's been done on the film's CGI since that preview came out.
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Source: 20th Century Fox
