Alita: Battle Angel was supposed to be the must-see event film of the early year. This spectacle of technology and filmmaking, based off Yukito Kushiro’s Gunnm, was going to revolutionize cinema forever. For almost 20 years, James Cameron has been teasing this popular manga adaptation, and the story of getting the film to the screen is, at times, more interesting than the film itself. Alita: Battle Angel is finally in theaters, now directed by Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, Machete), off of a script by James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, and the wait was definitely not worth it.
Science Fiction has officially passed James Cameron by. There’s no other way to say it. While his Avatar made a gazillion dollars at the box office, it was critically bereft of any creativity, and was a rehash of tired old ideas; it was essentially a lazy exercise in “same, but different” screenwriting. Alita: Battle Angel follows that same pattern. There is absolutely nothing new or unique here. The film is an insipid, loud collection of sci-fi cliches, set to oft-times questionable 3D. The characters are paper thin and grossly underdeveloped and have no motivations other than to get the story from one tired plot point to the next.
The action and fight scenes, which the producers use as the main selling point, are all animated, CGI affairs, meaning there’s nothing separating Alita: Battle Angel from, say, the Michael Bay Transformers films. I walked into the film hoping to see something amazing, and I walked out of the film angry that my time was wasted on such a spectacular level.
Alita: Battle Angel is the story of a cybernetic surgeon named Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), who, while scavenging the junkyards of Iron City, finds the core of an old soldier unit from The Fall, a great war that decimated the world. He takes the core back and rebuilds it, naming it Alita (Rosa Salazar, in mo-cap and voice acting), after his long dead daughter. Alita quickly meets Hugo (Keean Johnson), a street kid with a secret life at night, but during the day he spends his time playing Motorball in the streets with his friends and dreaming of one day traveling to the big city, Zalem, which conveniently floats overhead.
Dr. Ido and his ex-wife, Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), were once residents of Zalem and gave it up because of their now-deceased daughter. Chiren also wants to get back to the floating city, and has partnered with Vector (Mahershala Ali), who “runs” Iron City and the nightly Motorball tournaments. Alita’s emergence in this world sets off a chain of events that, well, really doesn’t go anywhere — literally. She becomes a Hunter-Warrior (think Bounty Hunter), and meets other CGI-heavy cybernetic characters played by Ed Skrein, Jeff Fahey, and Jackie Earle Haley, and supposedly there’s some mastermind in Zalem named Nova (an uncredited Ed Norton) who wants Alita for reasons never explained, and he sends most of the cast to kill her — again, for some reason; it is never explained — and, well, you get the gist.
Alita: Battle Angel is a veritable mess of tired story telling. Within minutes of meeting any character in this film, you know what will happen and how their already shaky character arc will pan out. Did Cameron even read the manga from which this is based on? And after 20 years, wouldn’t somebody recognize that this script does not work? It doesn’t help that Cameron partnered with Laeta Kalogridis, who wrote the equally awful Terminator Genisys, a film that Cameron claimed to have loved, further proving that the genre has passed him by.
Alita: Battle Angel was built on the foundation of failure from the beginning, and the technology being touted by the filmmakers is not new or groundbreaking. Robert Rodriguez spent so much time making sure Alita looked realistic with her huge, anime-inspired eyes, that he failed to realize that seeing the pores on her face in close up, but not on any other performer in the film, is actually a detriment. She never blended with the other characters/actors, which hurt the illusion and forever reminded the audience that we were watching a cartoon-live action hybrid. And video games have been using the same mo-cap and facial animation technology for decades, so you would be better off staying home and playing Uncharted 4 than seeing this film.
To put it ever so bluntly, Alita: Battle Angel is neither a good story, nor technologically advanced. If you are a fan of science fiction, you’ve seen all of this before, and while Avatar had its issues, it at least looked amazing in 3D. I can’t even say that about Alita. I’ve seen better post-converted 3D, and when thinking of a film to compare this to, the first one that comes to mind is 2016’s Gods of Egypt. This is not a compliment.
Alita: Battle Angel fails to live up to expectations, and is not, in any way, the must see event of the year. For fans of science fiction and of manga and anime, it’s insulting to various degrees, and you would be better served just reading the source material. There is nothing new or unique in this film, and it plays much like a collection of science fiction cliches that have been used countless times, over and over. Alita: Battle Angel proves once again that manga and anime doesn’t translate well into big budget live-action films, and even in the hands of proven filmmakers — and whatever James Cameron is now — getting that translation right is next to impossible. And in a project that fails in pretty much every way, that is the worst part of it all.
Alita: Battle Angel is rated PG-13 and is in theaters now.
