Alita: Battle Angel is the new budget sci-fi action flick based on a Japanese manga/anime called Battle Angel: Alita. This is a flick that James Cameron has been talking about making for around twenty years… but, in the end, he only produced it. Robert Rodriguez was picked to helm it which worried me a little because his output is a little iffy. Happy to say though that this might be his best flick.
Alita is one hell of an un-apologetically “live action” anime film. If you aren’t down with its hard core dedication to being as sci-fi as possible, with no winks or nods to how over the top it gets, then this ain’t the movie for you. If you want your sci-fi as sci-fi as can be with no nods to the normies, then you’ll probably dig this film (and forgive it’s handful of mistakes).
Alita: Battle Angel is set some 500 years in the future where… well… a whole lot of exposition-heavy stuff has happened. A major war called The Fall has destroyed all but one of the floating cities… and that city now hovers over a ramshackle slum of humanity (insert “haves and have nots” metaphor here… one the film doesn’t dwell on or moralize much about). In this high-tech mess, a cybernetics doctor played by Christoph Waltz finds the head and torso of a young female advanced cyborg in a scrap heap and fixes her up. Alita, played in motion capture by Rosa Salazar, has no memory of who she is… but finds a reserve of badass combat skills when put to the test.
Rosa Salazar’s performance is pretty great. Charming, funny, and dangerous… and that’s before they replace her head and body with a CGI creation. Much has been said about the big eyed CGI face they gave her – that it’s off-putting and deep in the uncanny valley – but I disagree having seen the film. Except for a few shots, this is one of the best motion capture performances I’ve seen yet.
As for the rest of the world, it looks just as amazing. I’m not sure how much this movie cost, but I’d hazard to say that it was a lot. They built a pretty convincing city/world and populated it with believable (and sometimes creepy body-horror) cyborg people. There’s not a dime of this flick that isn’t on screen and not a body part replaced that doesn’t look convincing.
This is an action flick with a lot of combat and future sports scenes. And it all works. Some of the most thrilling action I’ve seen in a movie in a long time… and all of it comprehensible, with heavy stakes that matter. I was impressed watching it how none of these sequences turned into CGI mush. It’s all CGI, certainly, and its all artificial but it looked, moved, and was paced by experts.
But, hey, not everything is perfect. While the acting is good, there’s some extremely clunky exposition and dialog in the first half of the movie. They couldn’t find a way to get across all the details of the world without some really awkward lines that the otherwise fine actors couldn’t quite pull off. And there’s some very abrupt and awkward camera edits that made me feel that there’s a longer cut of this already two hour film.
Arguably also, the film’s romance isn’t as built up as it needed to be by the end. I think the two leads did the best they could but the editing and time allotted to them was limited. This is a problem for the emotional heart of the ending of the flick and that’s unfortunate since so much else of the film worked. Shocking, I know. A big budget sci-fi flick that doesn’t stick the emotional beats.
So, yeah, this is a really solid piece of sci-fi action adventure film making. If the idea of body horror cyborgs fighting a tiny human-sized girl robot just doesn’t appeal to you, this probably won’t change your mind. But if that premise sounds fun, check this one out. It’s not here to apologize for its influences, just to entertain.
Score: 86