Looking at the ratings of various platforms, the ratings of the "Dream" comics are higher than those of movies and animations. On MyAnimeList, the manga had a rating of 8.49, the 1993 OVA anime rating was only 7.2, and the manga on goodreads was rated 4.19 out of five. On Douban, the score of the manga is 9.2, the god work, the animation 7.8, and the latest release of "Alita: Battle Angel" 7.6. Neither the anime nor the movies on IMDb broke 8, and the freshness of the movies on Rotten Tomatoes was only 60%.
Based on this, it may be said that the changes to the manga in the film version can only be regarded as barely passing at best. This is not surprising, this situation was already predestined when Guillermo del Toro recommended the comic to Cameron, because the original was "too voluminous", "too delicate", "too futuristic", and "too present".
The original author of the manga "Dream" Kishiro Yukito personally drew a poster for the movie "Alita: Battle Angel"
Go to heaven
In the movie, Alita always has a dream of going to heaven to see, and many viewers can't understand her obsession. This is well set up and laid out in the comics. The original is set in the post-apocalyptic era of the 26th century, when Earth's civilization has been destroyed once, and even the earliest Martian colonists have disappeared, leaving only ruins and unsolved mysteries on the earth's surface.
Gary is found in a dump in scrap iron town, a surface human settlement, with mutilated limbs but a nearly intact brain, and the doctor, Id, rescues her. Gary has lost her memory, her past life is blank, she only has a way forward, no way back. For her, the first connection to the world was the love for the savior Id, and the ancient Martian martial art that had been reduced to muscle memory, mecha.
The heroine of the Japanese manga "Dream" was originally named Gary (ガリィ); when the manga was released overseas, the official translator of the English version changed her name to Alita in order to make the heroine's name more "powerful".
So she chose Id's profession as a bounty hunter, and the first powerful opponent she faced, The Makak, gave her a full glimpse of the dark side of humanity. As soon as he was born, Markak was flushed into the toilet, lived in the underground sewers of scrap iron town, grew up eating human waste and rats, was burned until it festered, and was eventually transformed into a bug.
The Makak is like a metaphor for the human condition on the surface. He lives in the underground sewers of Scrap Iron Town, which is nothing more than a sewer compared to the ideal country of Salem, the city in the sky. There is no justice, no freedom, just endless entertainment, a wide variety of crimes, the instant satisfaction of desires, and the lifelong debt of becoming a reformer.
A clip from the manga "Dream"
In a cloud of filth, Gary attracts a glimmer of light, through which the vortex of fate is stirred. She knew that Id was an exiled Salem, understood his obsession as a human being to keep his flesh and blood, she fell in love, and watched her lover's dream of going to Salem shattered, she participated in the most cruel game, watched the strong man on the field die, and she also witnessed the strongest leader on the surface, Electricity, and his stubborn efforts to rebel against the order. She also made friends with a Salem girl.
Gary wanted to go to heaven to have a look, not for some inexplicable reason, nor was it a whim. She was looking for the answer to her own life, and for the bondage of the poor and warm souls around her.
But there is no answer in heaven. The pride of Iderson is absurd, because the Sareens, although their bodies are intact, have no brains, only chips equipped with brakes, and when they have any dangerous thoughts, they only have to regulate the path of life of citizens. The deportation of a small number of defective products of "brake failure" also avoids this fate of being completely manipulated. Even more ironically, these Sareens are nothing more than super-intelligent industrial products played on the genetic organ and made on the assembly line.
The ideal city of Salem, which human beings yearn for, despise, and rebel against, is filled with only some humanoid monsters. Who is more human-like than these self-proclaimed noble products of Salem and the surface humans living in the sewers?
What is a human being?
Scrap Iron Town and Salem are two faces of humanity. In scrap iron town, everything else seems meaningless except lust and mutual harm, where some people go out for a walk at night and are made into crafts, some people just add oil to the mechanical body and are sucked out of their spines, and some people just win a fighting game and are taken away from the body. But the people of Scrap Iron Town still have their own brains, they can imagine, dream, perceive, and love.
In Salem, everything is beautiful on the surface, in order, everyone is good, well supplied, stress-free, everyone retains the perfect human appearance and genes, but they don't know that their brains are completely removed on the day of the coming-of-age ceremony. What they think as adults, all their memories, are just data in the chip.
What both have in common is that they can only free up their freedom in the cracks between technology, capital, and power, from the black market merchants in scrap iron towns, to the leaders of the mercenary corps, to the superintelligence of Salem, who have long written the vast majority of their personal books of destiny, which almost means that they are free only when they are evil and kill themselves, and they only seem to be alive when they create chaos.
Another of Salem's defectors, the technocratic Tessedeno, who had long since understood the truth, summed it up this way: "In the human world, there are relatively two kinds of people, namely, laboratory animals, and experimenters who have the power to dissect their bellies. His theory stemmed from his early detection of the lie. The original author, Kijo Yukito (木城ゆきと, Hong Kong and Taiwan booksellers translate this name as "Kishiro Yukito") buried psychoanalytic theory in the setting, the scrap iron town symbolizes the original self of human beings, the original self is full of unfinished desires, primitive violent impulses, love and desire to die, so the world on the ground is also the same chaos, full of struggle and despair. Salem symbolizes the self's constraint on the self and the social side of human beings, but how to lead to the ideal of superego? Kishiro Yukito gave an answer - relying on chips. This is a naked mockery, as if to say that human beings are not worthy of the superego at all.
After knowing the truth about Salem, Tisdeno went on a different path, he wanted to become an experimenter, in the satisfaction of the will to power at all costs, while moving from the finite to the infinite, looking for a breakthrough to the true freedom of life, to explore the ultimate answer to the question of what is man. But Kishiro Yukito did not let him go. At the end of the first part of the canon, Titsdeno masters the so-called karmic mechanics, which can use the movement of electrons in the air to convey information, so that whenever he dies, the laboratory will automatically start the resurrection program and upload the backup memories.
He did not fulfill his wish, but became a toy of eternal destiny, a real experiment. At the end of the first part of the canon, his main brain chip goes crazy, and fate mocks all his efforts.
Killing Angels
Cameron describes himself as fond of "Dream" because of his daughter, so he especially appreciates the theme of "a strong female protagonist, who finds herself in one adventure after another, changes the lives of others, and changes the world around her". This may just be one clue to The Dream, which has a theme of zen in the entirely Eastern way.
Kishiro Yukito said: "'Dream' has two very different themes, the dark mode involves the dark side of life, and the light mode contains the goodness of human nature, in this stark contrast, I created human beings who struggle for survival in the dark world." But as mentioned earlier, such struggles are more like the small struggles of individuals on the web of reincarnation.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed the reversal of the two laws, and in the Critique of Pure Reason he pointed out a set of two-law reversals of free will: "The phenomena of the universe are not only dominated by the causal laws that operate according to the laws of nature, but are also influenced by the causal laws of free will. "There is no such thing as free will, and anything in the universe operates purely according to the laws of nature."
Both Gary and Tisdeno, starting from both the light and dark sides, ultimately seem to confirm the dialectical limitations of human rational understanding. This counterproductive sense of powerlessness, this sense of fatalism in the midst of all-pervasive reincarnation, constitutes the background of "Dream". If the mechanical lotus at the end of the first part is just a symbol, the second part of the canon, "The Last Order", is full of Zen flavor, full of public cases and machine edges.
In this way, Yukito Kishiro shifted his exploration of human consciousness from philosophy and science to religion. He buried many religious memes in his texts, such as the sky city of Salem and the cosmic city of Jerusalem, the New Jerusalem from the sky in the book of John, and the orbital elevator called "Jacob's Ladder". But his ultimate concern points to Buddhism.
Regarding what is human, he and Shiro Masamune gave a similar answer, that is, to act, to create, to use all efforts to explore boundaries, and to see themselves clearly in the collision with the world. It should be known that when a person silently accepts the arrangement of life without any resistance, he is not too far away from the non-human. This is the original intention of humanity, and it is also a self-help solution to avoid spiritual crisis in the era of nothingness. But on the other hand, he gave another answer, it is better to go with the flow and understand "emptiness". Look, the two laws are reversed.
Meet the mechanical girl of "love"
Even if the movie has the most wonderful action scenes in recent years, the story core of the girl's growth history and the one-man resistance to the sky hegemony is far from the original, and the rating gap with the original is also reasonable. Interestingly, Japan's earliest cyberpunk creation began in 1982 as an underground experimental film, and because there was no mainstream support and intervention at all, Japanese creators had no scruples since "Burst City". Today, these experimental "non-mainstream" works have been absorbed into the mainstream by capital and technology. Isn't that "cyberpunk" in itself? Don't say, don't say.