Alita: Battle Angel

 This one has been one I’ve been meaning to do for a while

Battle Angel: Alita is a Manga series created by Yukito Kishiro in the 1990s, it had 9 volumes and was obviously enough to catch the eye of some pretty big Hollywood figures. Most notably Avatar director James Cameron. But then Avatar made all the money and they’ve spent nearly a decade figuring out how to capitalise on that, leaving this series in the hands of Robert Rodriguez

Robert Rodriguez is generally more well-known for low budget flicks, his biggest budget was Spy Kids 3D, and that was… something, I think.

The film was released in January 2019 and whilst critics were largely divided, it seemed to hit a note with audiences, though not sufficiently as the film made $405m on its $200m budget, at best it broke even but some project that the film lost around $50m once marketing expenses are factored in.

Still, pop culture wouldn’t let it die, and the film was intended to get a rerelease in 2020, unfortunately the ongoing pandemic shuttered cinemas so the returns there were minimal.

Is Alita: Battle Angel any good? Let’s take a look.

300 years ago, an event known as the Great Fall occurred, humanity had evolved onto floating cities, but most crashed into the ground. Only one remains, Zalem, and underneath is Iron City, a scrapyard where the city below dumps its garbage. A scientist named Doctor Dyson (no relation to the vacuum guy) stumbles across a cyborg body with a working brain and fixes her up. She awakens with no memories of who she was, just some basic instincts, the ability to speak perfect English and the fighting style of Panzer Kunst.

Dyson is a Hunter Warrior, which act as a local police force claiming bounties on criminals the system assigns. Alita uses her fighting prowess to defeat an ambush and in doing so recalls one of her memories. She decides to take up being a Hunter Warrior to try and regain some memories.

She meets Hugo, a kind and empathetic ear for her and the two become smitten with each other, can their love overcome the trials of this world? And is that even enough to get them to Zalem?

OK, so I’ll start with a mostly positive, this film looks great. The CG is blended really nicely with the live action stuff, the action looks very impressive as does Alita herself. Her eyes look a bit weird but I think that’s intentionally part of the aesthetic. You can tell that this is the studio behind Avatar.

The cast is generally great, I quite liked Mahersara Ali as Vector, Keean Johnson as Hugo and Christoph Waltz as Doctor Ido to name a few but the best performance still comes from Rosa Salazar as Alita. A character with no memories is difficult to make charming but her natural charisma and some decent dialogue go a long way to making her a likeable protagonist.

But I’m story guy when it comes down it and that’s where this film runs into a few major roadblocks.

First off, there is way too much happening in this script. The Hunter Warrior stuff, the Motorball stuff, filling in Alita’s memories and the grand conspiracy stuff with Vector all compete for screen-time making the film feel really overstuffed and some bits of random convenience.

It turns out Hugo knows about a spaceship outside the city, as the URM (United Republic of Mars) used them. Alita’s memories are not addressed well enough, we do not know the wider context behind the URM, why they use human cyborgs or what their beef with Nova even is. The fact that Alita was an URM soldier should have had some significance to the story but it never felt like it had any impact at all.

The film uses Alita becoming a Hunter Warrior as a means to an end, to get her into the bar for the next action set-piece. It would’ve been nice to see her actually being a hunter warrior and earning bounties and slowly recalling bits of her memory.

There’s an action scene in the second half of the film that goes on for a very long time starting with a rollerball battle royale and ending with a confrontation with Hugo. The idea that Hugo was with a team jacking cyborgs for parts would’ve made for a dramatic revelation taken separately from a big action set-piece where he’s almost killed and Alita has to save him with some quick thinking.

And speaking of Hugo being almost killed, the final scene where he’s in a cyborg body is the one time the CG flat out doesn’t look very good. It also feels like having almost died in the last scene, bringing him back with a cyborg body just to kill him again felt kinda callous. Doctor Ido gets some development as a father figure to Alita, forgetting in portions that Alita is not his daughter but feels under-utilised, his role in the action set-pieces is pretty pathetic.

Alita: Battle Angel looks great, as you’d expect from a $200m blockbuster helmed by the studio behind Avatar and has some decent performances but the good looks and a lot of action seek to distract you from the plot, which is overstuffed and underdeveloped. It feels clear they were planning for a sequel which given this film’s performance is unlikely to materialise.

Rating 60/100