Directed by: Robert Rodriguez
Written by: Robert Rodriguez, James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis
Starring: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Keean Johnson
Live-action anime movies are generally pretty terrible; from Dragonball Evolution to Fullmetal Alchemist to Death Note, these movies have ranged from utterly painful to almost passable, and never anything more than that. With that in mind, when I say that Alita: Battle Angel, is actually quite good, you understand by what it compares to how monumental a success that it was even good at all.
The story follows Alita, a cyborg woman discovered in a scrap heap and revived, only to find that she has no memory of her past life. In the dystopian slum that is her new home, she must discover who she is amid the cyberpunk bounty hunters, Robocop patrol robots, and fast-paced metal death games that make up her home.
As a piece of pure, unadulterated action, this movie is pulse-poundingly excellent. The action is relentless when it happens; a fight kicks off with a moment of slow motion before launching in to an all-out cyborg brawl that at once tries to illicit the idea of pure chaos and tries to anchor you to moments of comedy and heroism between swaths of pure mechanical violence, and death races are treated as fun past-times where getting your metal body shredded to pieces is just part of the fun and then juxtaposed between the very real implications of such an event and what it says about the world, as well as complete change of pace and perspective when Alita herself jumps on to the track. Because it's all metal, the film just lets the violence explode on-screen without a need to worry about it feeling real, and as a result the ebb and flow of fights aren't constantly cutting to avoid showing the consequences of the violence. Everything about the action packs a punch.
In terms of story, the thing that makes this worthwhile is the wonderful title character. It's a fairly generic and straightforward plot that seems to pack in as many tropes as it can until it's almost bursting at the seams, rising and falling so many times that the movie feels a little out of breath by the end, but even as interest in the world and other characters begin to falter, Alita remains as an effective through-line for each and every story beat, literally holding the movie together with her insanely strong cyborg heart. For every moment where the movie feels the need to flatly explain the extended details of the world and lore, we get a sweet character moment where Alita wins the hearts of every dog lover in the world, showing her total purity and naivete without someone needing to point it out. Even the moments where this didactic childlike approach to doing right at all times could potentially feel trite ultimately work, largely because the film is self-aware enough to challenge and trial her worldview, and most importantly because of the heart-achingly honest mo-cap performance of Rosa Salazar. I can't imagine this will be the same for everyone, but I found that the the mo-cap animation was relatively seamless (at least for the sake of suspension of disbelief), and that even if it hadn't been, the approach Salazar took to the character made her the source of strength the movie needed her to be. Every line, no matter how cliche or potentially clunky, it delivered with the utmost certainty, selling you on the idea that Alita at least believes in what she says, no matter how ridiculous it might sound, even in-universe. She's passionate, and commanding, and a little bit flippant, and of these aspects are challenged over and over in such a way that no character step feels unearned. As a movie about Alita, Alita is a success.
This extends to much of what is immediately in proximity to Alita. Chrisoph Waltz is appropriately stern yet soft as surrogate father Dr. Ido, and the interplay of their relationship, while fairly predictable, is also filled with such genuine warmth that the lack of originality doesn't matter. A scene where Ido, having learned to let Alita go, tries his best to support her and stifles his own protective nature for her sake, and her newfound understanding of such an action is made sublime by the exchange between the two, the spoken and unspoken words, their expressions, it's all so surprisingly real in this high-octane movie where robots smash each other for spectacle.
That said, not everything else is quite as strong. Alita's love interest Hugo, while occasionally appearing as more than the broad archetype he was set up as, is performed only serviceably by Keean Johnson, never standing out in a way that makes the character particularly interesting and only worthwhile as he stands in relation to Alita; his worth as a character is entirely in how his existence challenges and re-defines how Alita thinks, and that's fine, but nothing more. Likewise, lore and story that don't directly relate to Alita are relatively uninteresting because they only get delivered through clunky dialogue that feels like its trying to pretend that it's not relevant to the plot even though the only reason it's brought up is because it eventually will be. Again, it's not bad, but it means any scene that doesn't involve a step forward for Alita is just sort of plain. Still, I didn't find it to be enough to detract from the movie so much that I didn't enjoy it, but the good parts were so comparably good that these slower moments that felt like they should have had more poignancy about the world simply didn't, and it stood out against the action and the character moments.
The Short Version: Alita's ambition shines when the film revels in its incredible action scenes or explores the pure nature of its title character, but it isn't exempt from the trappings of a bland romance, clunky dialogue, and structure-warping lore.
Rating: 7/10
Published February 17th, 2019
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