Alita: Battle Angel review

    ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL is a movie I missed during its initial run in theaters. This is a shame because I watched the original OVA when I was in highs school. I remember enjoying the fascinating juxtaposition of the flying city of Zalem over the horrible slums of Scrapyard. So, I was pleased when James Cameron stated he wanted to make a movie about the series. Mind you, that was literally decades ago so I was pretty certain I would never see the actual movie. Thankfully, that changed and I have now got my opinions on this seminal adaptation of a classic anime. My opinion? It's pretty good.

"I have the power!"

    If it sounds like I'm not particularly blown away, the truth is I'm not. It's an absolutely gorgeous movie and has a lot going for it but I also feel like it kind of meanders from point to point. It feels like a condensed number of manga volumes and that's really what it is. I almost feel like the story would have benefited from taking a single plot from the manga then making it into one single long original story. On the other hand, it actually does make a number of significant changes that tie things together more coherently.

    The premise is the world is post-post apocalypse. A war between Mars and Earth resulted in most of the planet being devastated with only the city of Zalem remaining. In the comic, it was located in Kansas but here it's located in South America due to having a space elevator. Zalem floats over the city of Scrapyard and is supplied by the poor who live down there. It's a bit like Elysium or, perhaps I should say that Elysium is a bit like Alita: Battle Angel and both are a bit like Metropolis. First World and Third World inter-connectivity.

The monster under the bed should be terrified.

    One of the residents of Scrapyard is Doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) and he finds a centuries-old cyborg head in the junk of Zalem. Reassembling her, he soon has a beautiful is strangely anime-looking young woman that he names after his dead daughter. Alita (Rosa Salazar) is initially wide-eyed and innocent but proves to be an accomplished warrior who isn't actually suited for her teenage body.

    Things go from being peaceful to hellish with the fact that Alita is being hunted by the ruler of Zalem, Nova (Ed Norton), using a variety of cyborg soldiers as well as the local crime boss Vector (Mahershala Ali). Thrown into this is the series-only character Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), who is upgraded into being Doctor Ido's wife as well as the mother of their deceased child. We also have Hugo (Keean Johnson), a young boy that wins Alita's heart. Literally.

    I love the world we're presented and the weird earnestness of its premise. That the people of Scrapyard are living in the kind of cyberpunk hellhole where not only do you not have a police force, but you have society rely on bounty hunters that kill all of their psychotic prey. That this is perfectly normal to the populace and they just carry on with their lives in the shadow of such terrible misery. Yet, for the most part, they manage to get along to the point they have teenagers playing Rollerblade games in the streets. The world is nightmarish but because we see it through Alita's eyes, we also see it's beauty.

Jennifer Connolly does well with her small role.

    This is primarily an action movie and we have Transformers-esque battles between Alita and various cyborgs. The highlight of the film's combat, though, is the organized sport of Rollerball that is one part race and another part gladiator arena. It is the circuses that, apparently, compromises the bread and circuses that Nova keeps the populace placated with. It only occupies a small part of the movie but is very entertaining. I don't buy Christoph Waltz, who is significantly older than the comic Ido, being able to murder cyborgs with a rocket-powered sledgehammer but the fact that they incorporated that element from the manga intact is a credit to the creators.

    The story is streamlined and made more emotionally resonant in a lot of ways that I think improves the material. The people of Zalem are left as humans rather than humanoid robots, Doctor Ido's relationship is more fatherly than ambiguous (with implications he may have meant for Alita to be his mistress completely removed). The conflict between Ido's desire for a daughter and Alita to be a warrior is underscored by her scavenging her own body. We also have Hugo's scumminess toned down where he is sincerely in-love with Alita, it's just he may want to escape Scrapyard a bit more.

Waltz is surprisingly good at playing non-bad guys.

    In fact, the movie's emotional strengths may actually be its weakness. I mentioned above that the people of Scrapyard are seemingly getting along pretty well despite its dystopian hellhole nature and there's a wide-eyed feeling of optimism radiating from Alita that infects the rest of the film. Yes, well, that actually robs the movie of some of its stakes. The world of Battle Angel/Gunnm is supposed to be a hellhole. A place where the populace has become machines for survival, poverty is rampant, and people can actually be mugged of their spines in the street.

    Part of what makes the manga interesting is the fact that just about everyone is morally compromised in some way. Doctor Ido is a killer-for-hire to fund his clinic. He's more like Doc Holliday than someone saintly. Alita in the manga and OVA actually thinks he's the local serial killer before the revelation he's a bounty hunter. Hugo is basically the kind of guy that kidnaps people, steals their kidneys, and leaves them to die. Alita just likes him because, cyborg or not, she's thirsty for his body. Alita herself was actually, pre-amnesia, a monster. Grit and darkness are things that are sometimes overplayed but Rosa Salazar plays Alita with such zeal and pep that you sometimes forget this is a monstrously terrible place. This is like if Disney made a version of Neuromancer and that is downright strange once you stop and think about it.

I need to re-watch Rollerball at some point.

    Also, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't address the elephant in the room of Alita's anime eyes. The decision to make her have wide-eyed literal manga eyes is something that really does bring you out of the movie and takes about twenty minutes to adjust to. This is twenty minutes that really didn't need to be wasted and is just gratuitously lost. No other cyborgs have Alita's eyes and it's distracting out of universe. It's also unnecessary as Rosa Salazar is endearingly adorable anyway and is robbed of what I'm sure was a lot of impressive emotes. I have a few other nitpicks like the fact they could have thrown in some more Asian characters for such a racially-diverse cyberpunk dystopia but those are minor.

    In conclusion, it's a fun movie and I enjoyed it a great deal but I wonder if they made all the right decisions in adapting it. A few changes here and there could have made it a blockbuster hit despite all the problems in its production. However, unlike a lot of films with bloated budgets and troubled productions, I really do like this film. I want to watch a sequel. I kind of wish I could get a director's cut without the CGI eyes and maybe a bit more darkness but it's still a solid piece of film-making. Also, unlike the dark and edgy film it could be, you can watch this as a family with reasonably small children.

8/10