Alita: Battle Angel

Starring: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein, Jackie Earle Haley, Keean Johnson

Director: Robert Rodriguez

Five minutes into Alita: Battle Angel and I could tell how spoiled I was as a viewer. Onscreen was a massive world, populated by digital effects so vivid that there may have been practical effects as well. The main character was a work of intricate, next gen animation that was mostly convincing, her face appearing humanly inhuman while mostly staying out of the uncanny valley. This was, on paper, everything I wanted as a fan of science-fiction and fantasy, someone who grew up on the Star Wars prequels and Jurassic Park movies.

And I was underwhelmed.

I can already tell Alita’s fanbase is rabid. You probably already saw the movie and loved it. If you saw it and loved it, I have nothing for you here. I get that time and effort went into this movie. I get that rarely is such a bold attempt made at fully adapting a manga into a live action movie. This is something I want too. America is getting the Avengers comedy hour when Japan is getting vivid depictions of worlds beyond our imagination. And what if we used that Avengers goof money to make something profound and massive. I want that.

I just think Alita ain’t it, chief.

I was actually heartbroken when the movie lost me, and it lost me very early on. You have the image of Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) wading through the trash spewed out by a city in the sky far above. He comes upon a torso of an advanced android (Rosa Salazar). Scans show she is, somehow, alive.

He picks up the torso and holds it at arms length, and there’s this unspoken sense not only of curiosity but affection, an instant connection between the known and the–

Anyway, next scene. We have to keep this plot moving.

And that’s the movie’s biggest issue. In a move to no doubt convince producers that this was marketable, all of the scenes are cut and hacked just a little bit before their emotional energy has a chance to resonate with us. Today’s viewer puts a high value on plot, and you can tell that was the mantra of whomever was in the editing chair. Things happen, but we don’t care because we don’t have a chance to feel them (yes, I know you care, fella who loved Speed Racer who is angrily making his reply to this review as we speak). I really wanted to care. The imagery was often beautiful, and the visuals often breathtaking. But you can’t take someone’s breath away if you don’t let them breathe.

Like I said, next scene: Alita’s hooked up to a set of monitors, and Ido spells out the details of what’s going on to Nurse Gerhad (Idara Victor, who has next to no lines despite being on screen for most of the movie). This girl is ancient tech. She’s martian. There was a war 300 years ago and the martians were the bad guys but they might also be the good guys, who knows? Ido doesn’t (or does he?), but he does know this robot girl could potentially replace his daughter, who was killed by one of his patients before he had a chance to give her legs.

Oh, that’s right: Dr. Ido is a doctor of mechanized limbs, in this world of cybernetic humans, he helps workers and sportsmen alike get the best care for their prosthetic arms, legs, torsos, hearts, etc. He has a method of collecting the limbs he needs, and a way of keeping the cost of the surgery next to nothing. It’s not completely above board. I would have watched a whole movie on his character, and his nighttime hobbies (when does he sleep?).

Alita awakens, in an ornately-made porcelain body. I was reminded of the brilliant art style of the Dishonored games, where materials other than steel and metal are used for cybernetics.

Perhaps Dishonored took its aesthetic from the manga, which I would very much like to read. She, frustratingly and conveniently, has no memory, and her memory comes back to her in moments of emotional intensity. That Alita can engage with the world almost like a child is, in theory, a joyous aspect of the early act of this movie. But it drags, and her infantilization does not necessarily translate to live action. The animation mostly avoids the Uncanny Valley, but she’ll do this sheepish smile on occasion, and it just looks wrong. Flashbacks will come to her, flashbacks of the war she was a part of, when her name was 99, 300 years ago, a war where she had a commander who was the same kind of humanoid android as her. These moments are some of the best visuals in the movie. I would have loved to watch a whole movie about 99’s training and ill-fated assault on the city in the sky. That would have been an amazing movie.

The movie we get ends up centering on her friendship with with the astronomically generic character of Hugo. They have a meet-cute involving Hugo pulling her out of the way of a Centurion, a quadruped robot. After that they are friends, because the plot says so. Hugo is basically the character of Aladdin from the animated Disney movie. He’s a street rat, but without the personality. He is also a bad person. Mild spoilers ahead: We learn that he is leading a gang of scrappers that kidnap cyborgs and strip them of their parts. Hugo is framed for murder, but explains that he didn’t kill anyone, merely paralyzed them and then stripped all of their cybernetic limbs off–which is often all of them. I was laughing aloud in the theater. That’s so much worse.

The entire plot feels weighted down by Hugo’s character, and also by the villains, which aren’t the Main Villains, but admirals and heavies that the first movie is dealing with while we will apparently get to see the Real Villain later (we catch a glimpse of him at the end, which I will not spoil, but at this point I was just resigned to the unintentional comedy the movie was throwing my way. Think of the way you felt when it was revealed at the end of Fantastic Beasts that we could have had Colin Farrell as a villain and had to deal with Johnny Depp instead). There is a brute named Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley) who may be an at-large serial killer, but the movie has no time to resolve that for us. My main takeaway was that he was very incompetent but the villain, Nova (won’t spoil), still was like, “You have to work with this guy.” Nova’s doing some excellent HR.

When the movie wipes the sleep out of its eyes and kicks into gear, the action is incredible. There is a scene that’s essentially gladiator roller derby (there’s also a really unnecessary scene near the beginning involving Hugo and his buds playing the low-fi version). There’s a scene were Grewishka’s got spiky tentacle hands, which is really cool. Though the tone of the movie is so inconsistent, that sometimes the shocking violence of the action scenes leads to unintentional humor. The beginning of the movie feels very much like a YA rebellion movie, and then suddenly Alita is hitting a man so hard that his face caves in (but the blood is blue, so it is PG-13!). I appreciate James Cameron’s attempt (and the blue blood for a lower rating was his idea) to make an expensive movie more marketable for a mass audience, but Robert Rodriguez tells excellent R-Rated stories and bonkers PG-rated stories, and this ends up being both at the same time.

I haven’t even mentioned the movie’s primary antagonist, Vector (Mahershala Ali), because what is there to say, really? He spends half the movie being puppeted by Nova, and is more of a Jabba the Hutt than a Darth Vader. Mahershala has had some bad luck this year, doing what bad luck does best: masquerading as good luck. Jai Courtney is also in the movie briefly as a murder-roller-derby champ. This was the first movie where my wife instantly recognized him. He never shows up again.

C