Alita: Battle Angel

photo courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     Director Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, Sin City) and writer/producer James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar) bring you Alita: Battle Angel, the blockbuster action flick coming at you this Valentine’s weekend. Based on the manga series Battle Angel Alita, the movie follows a cyborg warrior (Alita, played by Rosa Salazar) recovered and reassembled from a scrapyard. Not realizing her full potential, she adjusts to her new life in the post-apocalyptic Iron City. When a seedy businessman named Vector (Mahershala Ali) and his minions put a friend in danger, Alita comes to the rescue… and begins to understand her mysterious past.

     If Alita: Battle Angel is your type of movie—big, boisterous, CGI-heavy, action-packed—then you’ll probably enjoy the experience in spite of its flaws. It feels very much like a James Cameron-directed movie, complete with impressive effects, a badass heroine, epic stakes, apocalyptic imagery, etc. It’s the kind of movie that intends to wow you with spectacle, and Alita generally reaches that bar.

photo courtesy of imdb.com

     Part of its success stems from the digital wizardry visible in every single scene. The movie puts CGI front and center throughout (Alita, of course, is a motion capture CGI character), and in action scenes, the live action elements quickly slip away and we enter into loud, frenzied, computer-generated slugfests. They’re impressive from a technical standpoint, but they could prove exhausting for viewers less enthusiastic about action.

     Alita’s world-building is another point of interest. Cameron creates and develops interesting new worlds basically every few years now, and Alita demonstrates his talent for immersing audiences. Alita’s Iron City has plenty to offer—including its own sport, Motorball—and Cameron drives that point home by hinting not-so-delicately at sequels whenever he sees a chance.   

photo courtesy of pinterest.com

     Beyond the surface level spectacle, however, Alita is pretty shallow. Its characters are not only thin but embarrassingly generic; you could interchange them with a whole range of sci-fi heroes and villains and end up with much the same story. The plot, meanwhile, strings together big action movie beats and subplots without giving them any real coherence.

     And then there’s Alita herself. Computer-generated recreations of human characters have come a long way, but Alita isn’t good enough to carry the weight of a protagonist role and all the necessary emotional work that comes with it. To the filmmakers’ credit, they nearly dodge the uncanny valley by making Alita human-like, with huge, cartoonish puppy-dog eyes, rather than precisely human. That helps the audience not get totally freaked out by her, for the same reason that we stomach The Incredibles better than we handle Tom Hanks in The Polar Express. Even so, Alita’s still creepy from time to time. She may not be human, but the filmmakers intend for her to be photorealistic alongside live action human characters, and boy can we tell the difference.

photo courtesy of slashfilm.com

     FINAL VERDICT: It’s not very sleek storytelling, but Alita: Battle Angel sure does put on a show.

Alita: Battle Angel is rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language.

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