Alita is an inspiring film. And not for the reasons you might think.
If you have seen Alita: Battle Angel, you might have been drawn to the titular hero of the film, and the enemies she fights. With incredible cyber-warrior bodies, blades in their arms, and plasma coming out of their arms, its certainly understandable that they would be the main focus.
However at the Vulcan Augmetics HQ, we were paying attention to everyone else.
First, a little background: The film is set in Scrapyard City, a roughshod but lively metropolis of high rise buildings and alleys, which itself is underneath the huge floating city of Zalem. The population of Scrapyard city makes everything they need in Zalem and sends it up. And the first thing you will notice about all the people in the film is how many of them have robotic bodies and body parts.Every layout comes with the latest social features built in. Readers can easily share posts on social networks like Facebook and Twitter and view how many people have liked a post, made comments and more.
For us at Vulcan Augmetics, the most interesting and inspiring thing about the movie is not that these people have amazing robot bodies, but that these cybernetic attachments are mostly designed to help the people work and earn a living!
Sure, some of them are equipped as warriors or to play the insanely dangerous sport of Motorball, but most of them have these implants and cyber bodies to do their everyday jobs, and you can see a wild variety of specialist limbs.
At Vulcan this is the kind of future we are building for amputees (the working part, not the cyber warriors with chain-gun fingers!). We don’t see prosthetics as a quick fix or a patch up, we see them as an opportunity to push humanity forward, an opportunity to help people get back into work and to literally build themselves up.
As part of this we are launching the Uplift project in March to get prosthetics for 30 amputees and put them into work placements over the next 6 months, in cooperation with our local NGO and business partners. This is the vision we take from Alita: Battle Angel, and the one we would like to share with you.
If you think this is the future you want to make this happen, then register with us at www.wearevulcan.com for updates and information, spread the word about the campaign, and join our Facebook community to become part of the change.