Alita: Battle Angel
Directed by: Robert Rodriguez
Written by: James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis and Robert Rodriguez - Based on the graphic novel series "Gunnm" by Yukito Kishiro
Starring: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Keean Johnson, Mahershala Ali, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Skrein, Jackie Earle Haley, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Eiza González, Idara Victor
Action/Romance/Sci-Fi - 122 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 11 Feb 2019
Written by: James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis and Robert Rodriguez - Based on the graphic novel series "Gunnm" by Yukito Kishiro
Starring: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Keean Johnson, Mahershala Ali, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Skrein, Jackie Earle Haley, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Eiza González, Idara Victor
Action/Romance/Sci-Fi - 122 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 11 Feb 2019
From 26th Century Fox and the combined creative energies between two master world-builders, Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron, Alita: Battle Angel is that rare sci-fi story whose inhabited world feels believable, original, and one you want to dive right into to explore and are sad to leave behind. Based on a Japanese manga by Yukito Kishiro and long in gestation ever since Guillermo del Toro told Cameron about its cinematic possibilities more than 20 years ago, Alita was worth the wait. More than its cyberpunk and dystopian future surface layers, Alita is a coming-of-age story of a teenage girl who is also somehow over 300 years old. Cutting edge visual effects and performance-capture combined with empathetic human actors create an absorbing, enigmatic, and exciting world both action thriller-seekers and sci-fi aficionados will devour with relish.
See Iron City through Alita’s eyes. 300 years after an apocalyptic event known as “The Fall”, Iron City is a humming refugee-type city operating as a factory town supporting the world’s last sky city, Zalem, which hovers a few hundred feet above. Society is a class system of haves and have-nots following the rules of a state of nature - the strong prey on the weak. Cyberphysician, Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz, The Legend of Tarzan), finds a cyborg shell in Iron City’s vast junkyard which contains signs of life, a teenage girl’s brain. Bringing the brain back to life attached to a cyborg’s metal framework, Alita (Rosa Salazar, Maze Runner: The Death Cure) has no memory of who she is nor where she comes from. Dr. Ido has some hypotheses, but keeps them close-hold lest Alita attract the wrong sort of attention from Iron City power-brokers who are interested in the advanced technology powering the girl.
See Iron City through Alita’s eyes. 300 years after an apocalyptic event known as “The Fall”, Iron City is a humming refugee-type city operating as a factory town supporting the world’s last sky city, Zalem, which hovers a few hundred feet above. Society is a class system of haves and have-nots following the rules of a state of nature - the strong prey on the weak. Cyberphysician, Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz, The Legend of Tarzan), finds a cyborg shell in Iron City’s vast junkyard which contains signs of life, a teenage girl’s brain. Bringing the brain back to life attached to a cyborg’s metal framework, Alita (Rosa Salazar, Maze Runner: The Death Cure) has no memory of who she is nor where she comes from. Dr. Ido has some hypotheses, but keeps them close-hold lest Alita attract the wrong sort of attention from Iron City power-brokers who are interested in the advanced technology powering the girl.
Alita’s new street-punk friend and girl crush, Hugo (Keean Johnson), explains, “Nobody from down here goes up.” Once in Iron City, always in Iron City. But with a typical, plucky can do attitude, Hugo says, “You gotta be willing to do what it takes” to survive. Hugo assaults cyborgs as a side business, stealing their parts, and selling them to Iron City’s top mob boss, Vector (Mahershala Ali, Green Book). As soon as Vector gets wind of Alita and realizes there is more than meets the eye with her, the film’s plot kicks in and soon the eponymous Battle Angel will be born again. The audience is as wide-eyed and impressionistic as Alita, with her empathy-inducing gargantuan eyeballs, as we all take in the technologically-advanced, yet in many ways primitive, 26th century.
Cyborgs and 100% real flesh and blood humans coexist in Iron City, hence the heavy dose of cyberpunk. Upgrading ones appendages, torso, or entire package is both status symbol and opportunity-increasing since cyborgs operate as both the city’s bounty hunters, known as hunter-warriors, and the city’s athletes, as they bash and clobber each other chasing a ball around a circular track known as Motorball. Fans craving fast-paced action will enjoy the arena scenes as the cyborg athletes rip each other apart at break-neck speeds. More strategic samurai acolytes will be satiated with battles between the bounty hunters and their assignments, and the rest of us who want to see more of the world and explore the mystery of the strange girl have Alita’s evolution and discoveries to latch on to.
Somehow, Alita comes to Iron City from 300 years ago, but she is a teenage girl through and through. She is impulsive, tests her boundaries, and every feeling she experiences is the most important and life-altering one ever felt. Some may recoil at the juvenile romance circling between Alita and Hugo, but remember underneath all the armor and advanced fighting techniques is a pubescent ball of hormones. Something would be off if there were no dominant feelings of infatuation and the urge to sacrifice for the idea of great love. When Alita comes across a cyborg body she feels a direct connection with and may have worn in a previous life, puberty literally manifests itself in a metamorphosis from pixie girl to action hero badass.
Robert Rodriguez, adept at creating fascinating cities the audience cannot get enough of (see Sin City), employs what looks like next-generation performance capture techniques - even more advanced than Avatar. All the actors on screen are real, except for Alita, who is an enhanced amalgamation of Rosa Salazar in a performance-capture suit. The technology is so detailed it captures every contour of her face and expressions as if we were watching the real actor’s face. The live and synthetic action in the same frame is so seamless audiences will forget the computer and believe they are watching reality. It is photo real. The story is strong enough to make us care when a computerized character gets hurt and strings us along with promises of answers to come. Dystopian futures are a dime a dozen nowadays, whether or not they reflect how dire our 21st century reality feels, but this 26th century story is one to follow in both visual and intellectual capacities.
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