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Alita: Battle Angel
Starring: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Genre: Action
Rating: PG15
RUNTIME: 122 Mins
The iconic manga Battle Angel Alita tells a story about the distant future, when a teenaged cyborg is found on a giant scrap heap, and discovers who she is – and who she wants to be – through one amazing action sequence after another.
It’s an astounding work of fiction, and it’s now an astounding-looking motion picture, which crams so much plot into one film that there’s practically no room for the actual point.
The film, renamed Alita: Battle Angel, stars Rosa Salazar as Alita, the amnesiac cyborg who views this dystopian world with wide-eyed wonder. Christoph Waltz co-stars as Ido, the kindly cyborg repairman who repairs Alita and becomes her surrogate father.
Ido wants Alita to find her own destiny, free of the baggage that comes with her high-tech body. Nobody seems to know where she came from, why she’s so advanced, and why she’s an expert in a long-lost cyborg martial art.
There’s enough story in Alita: Battle Angel to fill several movies. Over the course of just one film, Alita investigates a serial killer, becomes a bounty hunter, falls in love, joins a deadly professional cyborg sporting league, and uncovers the truth about her existence.
Along the way she runs afoul of the sinister Vector (Mahershala Ali) and his scientist Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), who run the ‘Motorball’ races and dabble in kidnapping, mutilation and illegal scrap.
These events cover roughly the first four volumes of Battle Angel Alita, and although co-writers Laeta Kalogridis and James Cameron try to fit all those pieces together, the film has a very episodic structure.
Alita rushes through one storyline, which builds to a giant climax, and then the film takes a breather while the next story ramps up to another big set piece … and then begins again.
It’s almost like binging the first third of a TV series and then stopping suddenly, but Alita: Battle Angel is trapped in a 122-minute running time, so everything feels rushed.
The existential crisis at the centre of the original story, in which Alita struggles to figure out who she is and where she comes from, gets resolved quickly, because everything has to be revealed in exposition dumps in order to get to the next amazing action sequence. So the film plays less like a powerful science-fiction story and more like a breakneck Hollywood blockbuster.
But although Alita: Battle Angel falls short of its intelligent, philosophical source material, it’s still an incredible production. This is a vibrant, detailed world of cybernetic citizens and fascinating locations, simultaneously realistic and completely over the top. It’s that kind of wonderment that makes movies so magical in the first place. You are transported to another, incredible landscape full of bizarre, intriguing minutiae. Alita is a wonder to behold.
And at the centre of it all, Rosa Salazar gives a phenomenal performance. Though assisted by CGI limbs and artificially-enhanced eyes, she imbues Alita with warmth and humanity.
Her earnest humanity gets fused over the course of the film into a solid warrior’s shell, but her scenes with her would-be boyfriend Hugo (Keean Johnson) have tenderness. Their story pops through the post-apocalyptic wasteland like a flower emerging from a concrete crack, and unfortunately, it’s just as likely to thrive.
Alita’s relationship with Ido is also emotional and warm, but poor Christoph Waltz gets side-lined with half the film’s exposition, so his character doesn’t get explored very much. He’s Alita’s mentor, father, doctor, professor and conscience, and that’s a tall order. Fortunately, Waltz plays the part beautifully, and the image of the two-time Oscar-winner wielding a gigantic rocket-powered pickaxe never stops being fun.
Alita: Battle Angel is a major about-face for director Robert Rodriguez, who spent most of his career bucking the studio system in favour of low budget, imaginative independent projects. But despite his renegade attitude, he knows how to make a conventionally satisfying studio film. What’s more, his flair for eccentricity and taste for outlandish action makes Alita feel like an honest attempt to produce something exciting and new, in a climate where many other giant CGI spectacle films often seem homogenised and familiar.
Although Alita: Battle Angel doesn’t reach the artistic, emotional and thematic level of the manga, it’s a noble attempt to translate Yukito Kishiro’s work into a cinematic medium.
In the filmmaker’s zeal to put as much of the manga on screen as possible, they left out the quieter moments that gave all these amazing incidents a greater meaning. But everything that did make it into the movie is, at least, incredibly cool.
Ultimately,Alita: Battle Angel is Robert Rodriguez’s best film in many years. It’s an ambitious, impressive, visually spectacular production with great performances that make its strange world seem real. It’s a shame that, by trying to adapt as much of the original manga as possible, the filmmakers left out most of the intelligent commentary that made Alita so powerful in the first place.
Now showing in: Cinepolis Atrium Mall Saar, Cineco, Novo, Mukta and VOX.
Kristian’s verdict: 4/5
