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The new trailer for James Cameron’s Alita: Battle Angel adds backstory and battle

The new trailer for James Cameron’s Alita: Battle Angel adds backstory and battle

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The creepy Uncanny Valley eyes have it

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Photo: 20th Century Fox

The second trailer for James Cameron’s Alita: Battle Angel has dropped, and while it features a lot of the same quotes as the first one — plus some reused footage, including the title character’s extremely anime leaps — this new sneak peek adds more action, more backstory about the robotic Alita (she’s not what she seems!), more of a sense of the world where it takes place, and a new December release date. The movie was supposed to premiere on July 20th, but Fox delayed its release for five months — which, as the pop culture site Inverse notes, puts it in direct competition with big winter movies like Aquaman and Bumblebee.

Cameron has been working on the project for a decade. It’s an adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s influential Japanese manga of the same name (known in Japan as Gunnm), which follows an amnesiac female cyborg as she discovers who she really is, set in a dystopian, extremely class-separated future. The nine-volume manga has been adapted into an original video animation and a video game; Cameron’s film, however, will be the first movie version in English, and the first to use live actors — including Oscar-winners Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, and Mahershala Ali.

Alita: Battle Angel is currently set for release on December 21st, 2018.