Alita: Battle Angel

Alita: Battle Angel 2019

Robert Rodriguez who has brought us (along with a host of many other titles) From Dusk Till Dawn, Sin City 1 and 2 and The Mexico trilogy. He now directs and co-writes this action film that is based on Yukito Kishiro’s 1990 manga series of the same name.

James Cameron had the rights for this film for many years and according to him “had to flip a coin to decide whether he was going to makes this or the Avatar franchise”. After devoting himself to those big blue people, Rodriguez asked Cameron if her could take the script and cull it down to a working screenplay. Once finished, Cameron was happy to let him direct and take a co-producer role to ensure the script made it to screen.

Set 600 years in the future and 300 years after “the fall” (a great war that destroyed all but one of the futuristic floating cities) Alita (Rosa Salazar) is found in a scrapyard just outside Iron City by Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz). He takes the unconscious cyborg to his clinic and repairs her. She awakens with no memory of who she is, where she came from, or the world she finds herself in. We join her on her journey of self discovery as she learns about her new life while slowly remembering her old one.

Salazar was great in the titular role, I was a willing passenger with her as I watched her witness this world for the first time. Her naivety and innocence carried me along. She, along with Waltz (who was solid without being at his best), are the heart and soul of this film. Mahershala Ali and Jennifer Connelly in my opinion were woefully underused. Nothing wrong with their performances, but their roles could have been given to myriad people.

This film looks and feels epic, there has been absolutely no expense spared. Co-written by Rodriguez and James Cameron, so you know these guys can put a world together that people want to see. The fight scenes are some of the best CGI that I have seen. It is unashamed in it’s manga-ness (pretty sure that’s not a word) and pulls no punches as we go from one action packed scene to the next, sometimes at the cost of any real structure.

The main issues I felt the film had were in pacing and storytelling. It seemed to want to say so much in such a short time that the message became a little garbled. A weak script and too many exposition scenes took me out of the movie as they tried to move the plot along at a fast pace. There was a love story side plot that didn’t work for me and could have been dropped entirely which would have freed up some time for some of the other rushed (or dropped as quick as they started) plots.

For a film that reportedly cost the same as The Green Lantern and $179m less then Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, it looks (and is) way better then both. It is an amazing looking, structurally messy movie that I kinda enjoyed and wouldn’t mind seeing again.