MOVIE
Alita: Battle AngelRosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz
Director Robert Rodriguez
Alita: Battle Angel begins with cyborg doctor Dyson Ito (Christoph Waltz) sifting through a junkyard full of robotic spare parts in order to find anything he can use.
If you're cynical, you might say that's symbolic of just what director Robert Rodriguez and co-writer/co-producer James Cameron did to piece this movie together: rummage through the remnants of established sci-fi properties in order to form a cohesive chronicle within the confines of its genre.
Based on the manga work Gunnm, Alita adapts many visual cues and the narrative structure from a 1993 anime adaptation of the same name, which, though short, managed to pack in a sprawling cyberpunk universe with a rich and complex lore.
In this movie, which plays over a much longer running time, the story follows Alita (Rosa Salazar), whose cyborg remains Dr. Ito finds during his scavenger hunt. He takes her back to his shop and gives her a body he once intended his daughter to wear. While her brain is human, the rest of her is artificial. She doesn’t remember her past, but has enough memory to retain supreme martial arts instincts, leading Ito to suspect a military history.
The movie is set in a typically derivative dystopian era all too familiar now with futuristic settings, a dingy cross between the worlds of Dredd and Mad Max, a grimy post-apocalyptic city that’s also an overpopulated metropolis. And it's within this chaos that Cameron and Rodriguez try to cram some order with a myriad number of twists and turns.
Looking over the grimy grounds below are elite communities who live in a utopian (even Elysian) city in the clouds that everyone on the surface yearns to reach one day. Believing that the junkyard is a disposal ground for broken cyborgs from this eye in the sky, Alita hopes to somehow travel there to learn more about herself.
The overall plot of Alita trying to figure out her identity is muddled by her journey of turning into a bounty hunter while also being involved in a vicious game called Motorball, with the winners of tournaments granted a trip to the promised land that hovers like the stranded alien spaceship in District 9.
It's in the fighting scenes that Battle Angel shines most. Rodriguez takes advantage of the fact that cyborgs aren't really human to exercise his penchant for gore while keeping within the PG confines, with hack-and-slash destructiveness that result in a significant amount of bodies split in half, decapitated and torn to pieces. The visceral intensity, reminiscent of the bloodlust seen in his movies like Machete and From Dusk Till Dawn, creates a visual spectacle, even if most of it is CGI-generated.
And speaking of CGI, you will either love or hate the decision to retain Alita’s prominent eyes, so characteristic of the manga aesthetic. While it's clearly a tribute to the original anime, it just doesn't make sense because everyone else's visual orbs are “normal”.
There's a love interest in the form of Hugo (Keean Johnson) to introduce a semblance of emotion in an otherwise action-oriented movie, but it seems to take more prominence than Alita's effort to merge with the rest of the community as the last of her kind.This short-changing of social introspection for shallow relationship melodrama is one of the film's low points.
Ultimately, there are many plot lines left dangling to suggest that a sequel is inevitable. Whether viewers' appetites have been whetted enough to entice them to return for more of this unique combination of live action and CGI manga remains the true test.
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