I sat in front of my TV preparing to watch this movie for the first time, trying to think like my fourteen-year-old self, when films like this filled me with wonder. Would Alita: Battle Angel do the same? It certainly had all the benchmarks for it: High adventure. Alien-ish type creatures. Robots. Fighting. Pretty girl on the poster. I even microwaved some popcorn. I was all in.
What I got was a movie full of contradiction. It was small when it should have been big. Big when it should have gone small. Loud when it should have been soft. Simple when it should have been complex and well, you know the rest. It was also beautiful to look at, clever with several key moments, exciting more than once, and even a little emotional.
My fourteen-year-old self most likely would have loved it. That’s for sure. The world director Robert Rodriguez builds is believable and darkly mesmerizing, even as it never ever truly feels real. That fits the narrative though, and I watched feeling as though dropped into a new big-budget video game. I wanted to explore it, peak around corners, go into rooms, and talk to the characters milling about. I couldn’t of course, nor does the film either, having no time to let us get lived into the setting, much of the background effective but kind of abstract. All we know is that there was a war three hundred years ago and things are bad on the ground, good up in the air.
That’s the story really. We meet Dr. Dyson (Christoph Waltz), scrounging around a dump site in Iron City that the floating paradise Zelam uses to drop all its refuse. In it, while searching for parts, he finds the discarded remains of a broken android and realizes that its human brain functions are still active. Back at his laboratory, where he specializes in upgrades for robotic limbs, he rebuilds the scrap into a female teenager, one with human features and cognition but unable to recall its past. Total amnesia. She decides to call herself Alita and learn more about her new life.
Out and about one day, she meets Hugo (Keean Johnson), a young man who dreams of living in Zelam, as many do, playing a street version of the popular televised game of Motorball (sort of like this), the only way to win a chance to the sky city. Naturally, she tries it and proves herself more than she looks. That’s because there’s a secret about Alita that only comes to light when she further demonstrates some rather acrobatic combat skills in defending Dr. Dyson, who has a few secrets of his own. Now she has a way to get to Zelam, but there are powers that want her stopped, for obvious reasons (?). A fight on the Motorball rink will decide her fate.
It’s not like there’s nothing to have fun with while trying to get immersed in Rodriquez’s fast-paced thriller. Things are genuinely exciting and there’s plenty of meaningful action, especially when Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley), a monstrosity of man and machine on a singular quest shows up (with an upgraded weapon that breaks all the laws of conservation of mass). Good stuff. It’s just when people start talking where it loses all its traction. Okay, maybe not all of it, but this is a story with very simple dialogue and very simple themes, clearly pandering to a large international audience. When the inevitable love story between Alita and Hugo sets in, it’s got all the punch of a puffball, mostly because it’s so thinly played out, it hardly matters.
There’s the always great Jennifer Connelly, who plays Dr. Dyson’s ex-wife, straddled with a haunting past but given no presence or sense of identity in this to make us care. She just kind of lingers in and out with barely any expression and that’s it. Mahershala Ali is given a meaty part but also seems lost in the shuffle, feeling rather generic in a thankless role that sees a poorly orchestrated end. And then of course there’s Waltz, who is left to be the father figure for Alita, and it works for the most part even though Waltz never gets a chance to really elevate himself.
And that’s the real problem. There is no punch to the gut here, no feeling of despair, no longing, no anger, no authentic motivation for any of these people, all of whom just sort of deliver their lines (aside from Haley who is the absolute best thing going in the whole feature). That’s not to say that Alita, voiced by the talented Rosa Salazar isn’t impactful. Salazar is deeply embedded in the CGI character and runs the gamut from fearful to courageous, love-struck and betrayed to hero and beyond. While I could quibble with the presentation of Alita herself, a rather wispy looking, cookie-cutter girl ripped right from the pages of any in the genre, with her big eyes and pencil thin waist, flitting about with no sense of weight to her body, Salazar lands most of what she has to say with some flair. I liked Alita as a person and wished the story gave her more time to explore her feelings of isolation and curiosity.
However, this is a movie with a purpose, to kick off a franchise (of which there is still much speculation though no confirmation). There can be no doubt of this as the film is absolutely rife with setup and lack of resolution, including a final frame (with an appearance of Edward Norton) making it clear this was designed with many in mind. Will it happen? Do we care? It’s hard to say. The market is flooded with this kind of movie now, and with so much content on so many platforms competing for attention, it’s hard to see how a sequel could find time or money to get made.
I’m still going to recommend this, if anything for the creativity in the set design and the numerous robotic creatures throughout the story. The fourteen-year-old in me would have found them the best thing coming and spent hours after at the drawing table making my own. And that’s probably what most younger audience members will feel, a rush of imagination before getting distracted by something else. See what the kid in you thinks.