‘ALITA’ BLURS THE LINES BETWEEN MAN AND MACHINE
New on Blu-ray
Alita: Battle Angel 20th Century Fox DVD/Blu-ray, $29.98; 4K/3D, $49.99; also available on VOD
The big-budget science-fiction action picture drew only modest crowds at U.S. multiplexes this year, but with foreign receipts factored in, it’s actually been one of Hollywood’s biggest money-makers in 2019. Adapted from Yukito Kishiro’s manga series, the film was in the works as far back as the early 2000s, when James Cameron was slated to direct. Instead, Cameron handed the project off to director Robert Rodriguez, asking his colleague to tell this story about a realistic cyborg (played by Rosa Salazar) who investigates the truth of her own past on a crumbling 26th century Earth. An engaging lead performance and state-of-the-art digital effects distinguish a movie that’s already built a fervent cult following, thanks to its elaborate worldbuilding and its exploration of the increasingly blurred lines between human and machine. Special features: Lengthy cast/ crew interviews, comprehensive featurettes and motion comics that explore this world further
VOD
The Great Hack Available Wednesday on Netflix scandal in this documentary, which takes detailed, wonky explanations of how information gets disseminated these days and adds humanistic character sketches to help audiences understand something so complicated. Stepby-step, the film recounts how a data-mining firm scraped personal information from millions of Facebook users, analyzed the patterns and fed the results to political operatives working to influence elections. The movie is a chilling warning about what happens when people on the internet fail to safeguard their privacy.
TV set of the week
From the Earth to the Moon HBO Blu-ray, $39.99
One of the most ambitious of HBO’s earliest prestige miniseries, the Emmy-winning 1998 docudrama takes an at-times experimental approach to the story of NASA in the ’60s and early ’70s. Over the course of 12 episodes, producer Tom Hanks (who also contributed as a writer and director) and his creative team use expensive special effects and documentary footage to re-create not just the circumstances of the Apollo lunar missions but also the cultural moment surrounding them. The series represents a remarkable confluence of imagination and effort — not unlike space exploration itself.
Special features: A featurette explaining how these episodes have been fully remastered in HD with new digital effects