Alita: Battle Angel opens today.
Alita: Battle Angel brings the cyberpunk manga source to thrilling action, but I cannot say the same for Rodriguez’s inert handling of the talented roster of actors. He got the cyborgs and action right, but not the humans. The visuals are top-of-the-line, the story needs oiling.
It’s the 26th Century and remnants of humans are living together with cyborgs in post-apocalyptic city of Scrapyard after a brutal war between Earth and (humans living in) Mars. Alita wakes up not knowing who or what she is, after cybernetic specialist Dr. Ido (Christoph Waltz) puts her together. As her memory returns, the more she realizes that she has to fight not only the mercenary cyborgs sent out to destroy her, but to rise up against the ruler of the floating city of Salem, Nova.
It’s nice to see that Hollywood is continuing to pursue the trend of investing on strong female characters in the lead considering that Alita isn’t as well-known as Wonder Woman (and even less than Captain Marvel.)
It may not necessarily be entirely to Rodriguez’s credit but to WETA’s for improving on their Gollum performance capture technology and translating a completely photorealistic character with convincing emotional delivery. There’s no uncanny valley effect here at all. On screen is a cyborg character on a physical, psychological and emotional journey to discover herself and her purpose – almost completely forgetting that what we are seeing is a computer-generated image seamlessly interacting with real humans. Credit to Rosa Salazar too for providing the base of that performance to feel “real.” This won’t be forgotten come awards season for Visual Effects next year.
The film has many visual set pieces (the Motorball, the first fight, the chase across Scrapyard’s streets, the brief flashback of the War on the Moon) all of which add to Alita’s resurgence as a freedom-fighting warrior.
And yet so many characters just stand about (literally) with brief exposures – including the arch-nemesis (uncredited surprise actor) – it’s almost frustrating to realize that this is a long tease for subsequent sequels.
One can almost seemingly distinguish that the spectacular set pieces were supervised by Cameron, and the inert characters were solely on Rodriguez.
It’s strange that the film can get quite gory and violent with a PG rating, while trying to package the whole as family entertainment that’s missing a funny talking pet. Alita’s love interest Hugo (Keean Johnson) declares at some point, “It’s a harsh world down here” – even though Scrapyard scenes depict what looks like a thriving multi-racial society living in relative peace. Never mind that this post-apocalyptic world didn’t seem to have been decimated by climate change.
Well it is obviously Part One.
Alita: Battle Angel opens today nationwide from @20thCenturyFox
acid reflects 
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