Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

It’s a curious thing to observe James Cameron, who co-wrote the screenplay to Alita: Battle Angel, hand over the keys to such an expensive and expansive universe of characters, concepts, and ingenuity to a director as inconsistent as Robert Rodriguez.  Rodriguez’s films tend to do best when they’re limited to one of two basic concepts that he can run with, and Alita would seem a challenge that only a handful of directors, including James Cameron himself, would be able to keep tight control of without it spiraling down into meaninglessness.  Story-telling is the key, but Rodriguez is more of a stylist than a storyteller, so presenting this whole new world to build, with characters we’re just getting introduced to, in a compelling enough fashion to recoup its lofty $200 budget seems a gamble most other producers would probably not make.

The origin of Alita: Battle Angel starts with Yukito Kishiro’s intricately plotted 1990 manga, something this adaptation has to simplify in order to make it palatable for wide-release audiences.  The setting is an Earth five centuries from now, a mostly tumultuous and vice-filled world that suffers even more by comparison to the life of luxury from the beaming city utopia called Zalem that floats above their heads. Christoph Waltz plays Dr. Ido, a brilliant scientist who has been through he trash-heaps of history to find something of value and meaning. Ido soon discovers the remnants of a robotic entity, taking it back to his lab for rehabilitation, resulting in a cyborg creation he has dubbed “Alita” (which was also the name of the daughter he lost in a tragedy), who has the mind of a teenage girl and hard-shell body to match. She walks, talks and understands, but one thing she can’t readily do is remember who she is or why she exists. Ido provides fatherly guidance, but Alita is drawn to battle and action by her nature, stoked further by an interest in the local boy named Hugo, who sees more potential in Alita’s abilities that could make her formidable in a world that values such adept skills in the arena of conflict.

While this is going on, Ido’s ex-wife, Dr. Chiren (Jennifer Connelly) has spent her time in the employ of a shady man named Vector (Mahershala Ali), who dangles the possibility of a trip to Zalem for her cooperation to achieving his ends, mostly having to do with finding new recruits for the lucrative but highly dangerous sport of Motorball, in which participants essentially battle to the death for their ticket to shangri-la.  Meanwhile, a class of high-tech bounty hunters, called Hunter-Warriors, circle about the city to presumably take out the riff-raff.

The main assets to Alita: Battle Angel lie primarily in its production design, with intricate and fluid visuals, some elaborate and highly energetic action sequences.  Although the story is limited to perhaps a half-dozen main characters, there is still an epic feel to the film that suggest an unlimited amount of ways for the plot to expand.  Like Blade Runner, it’s a conceptual Earth that has a great deal of thought going into its futuristic design and history, leading you to want to explore its depths, but that richness in conceptual detail is relegated to the background, as we must establish the characters, their situations and mount a fast-moving plot to follow to draw out the action and thrills down the road.

The difficulty for Rodriguez in this effort is in trying to find the balance between putting in action and thrills with explaining this version of the future, how we ended up in such a place, and where the story will ultimately go. At just a little over two hours in length, Alita: Battle Angel gives the bare minimum in exposition to keep audiences on board, which will help most audiences stick with the proceedings and be interested, but there’s not enough of a build there to get us fully engrossed when the time comes for suspense and intrigue.  However, as even the bare-bones minimum is still quite dense, there really isn’t much in terms of dialogue that isn’t providing information or setting up for another conflict, resulting in characters that are thinly defined roaming around in a world that doesn’t quite feel as lived in as it might otherwise in the course of a television show or a long-running manga.

As such, performances are not a strong suit, despite quality thespians, with many of the actors looking idealized or artificial in the world presented.  Christoph Waltz gets the most amount of material, though he too looks like a video game character walking out and about with a hat, trench-coat and giant “rocket hammer”.   Jennifer Connelly gets an identifying dot on her forehead and to look and talk serious throughout, while Mahershala Ali looks like he’s walked off of the set of The Matrix wearing all black, as well as sunglasses, except when his body is taken over by the powerful overseer that commands him known as Nova.  The most personality within the story is given to Alita herself, though the creation of performance-capture animation, but so impressively done that she looks quite real, with the exception of her too-large eyes that will have some recall that Waltz also appeared as Walter Keane in the Tim Burton drama, Big Eyes, making us wonder if he’s now choosing his roles by the amount of exposed eyeballs he will work around.

Though the performances are mostly a wash, we should at least give some credit to the film-makers for providing just enough sympathy for the character of Alita to keep us wanting her to prevail in this rough-and-tumble world of killers, fighters, and mercenaries. A love story for her brews with the street urchin who is actually working against her, Hugo, which also gives a certain pathos to the role for his internal conflict that offers the closest thing the film has to a character arc.  Although it is bland and somewhat predictable, the romance its relatively inconsequential in terms of the overall conflict at large, but it does serve to keep general audiences something to hold onto between all of the exposition and high-energy action sequences.

With the exception of the elegant Alita herself, character builds are a bit on the grotesque side, with the fighters and mercenaries mostly appearing as human faces on top of goliath-sized mechanical bodies. This also allows for plenty of mechanized gore, as the MPAA has thus far determined that impalings, decapitations and dismemberments are OK to show liberally in a PG-13 movie, so long as this violence occurs to individuals who aren’t entirely biologically human.

Alita: Battle Angel provides just enough action, intrigue, and interest in the character and the world around her to be entertaining enough to recommend, although some viewers may find it a disappointment that the film is not self-contained, intending that there will be a continuation in a sequel which, at a reported $170 million to produce, is a risky proposition to assume.  However, given the international market’s love of films like this, perhaps Cameron and company feel it’s a safe enough bet, willing to let the action stop ‘in medias res’ and hope you’ll care enough to join their world of Hunter-Warriors for round two.

Qwipster’s rating: B-

MPAA Rated: PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language
Running Time: 122 min.

Cast: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Keean Johnson, Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein, Jackie Earle Haley, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Jeff Fahey
Cameo: Marko Zoror, Casper Van Dien, Edward Norton, Rick Yune, Jai Courtney, Michelle Rodriguez
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Screenplay: James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis (based on the manga series, “Gunnm”, by Yukito Kishiro)