The story actually gets a lot more complex than
that. Alita is essentially a teenager and Dr. Ido quickly becomes her father
figure. Alita falls for a boy, Hugo (Keean Johnson), who is is a real scrapper.
She makes enemies with a lot of people. There's the pretty-boy bounty hunter
Zapan (Ed Skein), the brute cyborg assassin Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley),
Motorball entrepreneur Vector (Mahershala Ali), and many others. You see, she's
sort of a chosen one and a badass, although she can't remember her past. And
there's Jennifer Connelly's Chiren floating around, who seems to have a
connection to everyone.
The key selling point of Alita: Battle Angel
is that it's produced and co-written by James Cameron. For nearly 20 years,
he's been working on getting this Japanese magna adapted into a movie.
Cameron's fingerprints are all over this. The movie has a nearly obsessive
commitment to the world-building, often at the expense of the story. Cameron is
thinking several steps ahead, moving things into place for several sequels. The
price tage for the film (reportedly over $170 million) is very Cameron-esque.
That said, I think the film makes even more sense when looked as as a Robert
Rodriguez film (He directed the film). Rodriguez has a bizarre dichotomy as a
director. He either makes fantastical family adventure films (Spy Kids, The
Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl) or pulpy, violent films (Sin City,
Machete, Desperado). Alita: Battle Angel is a fusion of
those two types of films. Alita is a very fantastical movie, and the
innocence of the character Alita as well as the romance at the center of the
film is meant to appeal to younger audiences. But, the rather extreme cyborg violence
and dialogue that's more focused on setting a tone than adding nuance to the
story are trademarks of Rodriguez's more mature films. Regardless of which
filmmaker you credit the film to, the end result is a pretty muddled movie with
occasional fun moments.
I didn't like Alita: Battle Angel very much.
The world never made sense to me. The characters interacted like they knew they
were in a movie and had to make the most of their scenes. The stroytelling was
rushed and unnatural. The world of the film felt incredibly small. In this
enormous city, every character of note seemed to already know each other or
would cross paths far too coincidentally. And the city felt physically small.
Every outdoor scene or chase seemed to happen on the same two or three
streets/sets. I hated the romance story. It was completely unneeded and
developed too quickly. Everything developed to quickly. By my estimation, the
whole movie takes place over about a week or two yet that's enough time for Ido
and Alita to develop an affectionate father-daughter relationship and for Alita
and Hugo to fall deeply in love. There's also a point when Alita [and her big
eyes] nearly turns into Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction. It was
concerning.
I suppose the action scenes are OK. I didn't get
lost in a blur of CGI very often. I often felt the scale of the assorted
locations. The motion-capture work is tremendous in some places and awful in
others. Alita is close to perfect. I pretty much forgot that she wasn't real.
All the other cyborgs looked very fake though. Any time it was a human face put
on a clearly inhuman body it was hard to take seriously.
Too much of the cast was miscast or wasted. Waltz
seems believable early on, but every time he holds his mechanized hammer later
in the movie looks very silly. He's believable in his day job, not in his night
job. The other two Oscar winners in the movie, Mahershala Ali and Jennifer
Connolley, are completely wasted. I've like Rosa Salazar elsewhere (Maze Runner
in particular) but very little of her personality comes through in Alita.
Recent breakout performers like Jorge Lendeborg Jr. and Lana Condor weren't
given enough to do.
When is comes to expensive SciFi passion projects, Alita:
Battle Angel is slightly but not significantly below average. I'd put it
below the likes of John Carter
and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
and just about even with Jupiter Ascending.
History will not be kind to the film, if it's remember at all. To its credit,
few movies have left me asking as many questions afterwards, but they aren't
the good kind of questions. Alita: Battle Angel is a baffling as it is
audacious in its attempt to built a new cinematic world.
One Last Thought (with possible spoilers): What's the morality of killing cyborgs? I have no idea
how much I'm supposed to value life in this movie or what even counts as life.
Since Alita is the film's protagonist, I assume we should view cyborgs as
basically human. In that case, there is so much wanton and brutal killing in
this film. I mean, what kind of Ancient Roman savagery is Motorball? In
Alita's race alone, she kills a dozen people. And everyone is just cool with
that? Who would compete in this sport? It's not like it employs slaves or
prisoner. And is there a pecking order between humans and cyborgs? When Hugo
gets turned into a cyborg, should that freak him out, or is that a common
occurrence? I feel like the movie tries to have its cake and eat it too. We are
supposed to view the cyborgs are human but not equate their dismemberment as
something savage.
Think of it this way. In a Rambo movie,
Stallone shoots guys and they fall dead. Maybe there's a little blood, but
since we don't know the guys and they don't focus on it, we as an audience
don't process it was more than Rambo getting an obstacle out of the way. Now,
imagine if Rambo decapitated one guy and cut another guy's limbs and torso into
a dozen pieces with a machete, and the camera showed it in slow motion or
zoomed in for us to focus on the lifeless corpse. Just because there's no blood
doesn't mean something is disturbingly violent. Oh, and they kill a dog. I
don't know where else to complain about this. That was wholly unnecessary.
One More Last Thought (more spoilers): Is this a "statutory romance" story? That's
the term TV critic Dan Fienberg (and others, I assume) uses for supernatural
stories where ancient, forever youthful looking vampire boy falls in love with
high school girls. While Alita looks like a teen, she's actually 300 years old.
That makes her falling for teenage Hugo a little weird. It also makes me wonder
what aging is like for cyborgs in this world. Do they age? Looking at
centuries-old Alita makes me think "no", but then, why would someone
design a weapon of mass destruction to look like a teenage girl? This is a
rhetorical question, of course. The answer is that the story is based on a
Japanese steampunk manga series, which virtually necessitates that design
choice.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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