Alita: Battle Angel

Dir: Robert Rodriguez

2019

**

In an interview late in 2017, Robert Rodriguez said of his Alita collaboration with James Cameron, "This just doesn't happen. Guys like Quentin Tarantino and Jim Cameron only write scripts for themselves to direct. When Avatar became the biggest movie of all time, he told me that he's going to spend the rest of his career making Avatars, so I said, 'What happens to Battle Angel then?', because as a fan I was just interested! And he said, 'I don't think I'll ever get to do that. Hey, if you can figure out the script, you can shoot it!' So I took it home, spent all summer working on it, cut it down to 130, 125 pages, without cutting anything that he missed. It was a great gift. We had a blast; anytime I had a question I could just call him or email him and he would send back these hugely detailed answers that were so helpful. He just loves being the producer that he always wants. The guy's just so freakin' smart. Getting to learn from someone like that was the greatest internship ever." While I’m glad the two film makers got on and had a great time, I find it baffling that the director of El Mariachi, Desperado, From Duck till Dawn and Sin City sees himself as an intern. I’m not sure whether it’s humble or shows a complete lack of confidence. Sure, some of his recent films haven’t been that great, but they’ve been a hell of a lot of fun and his self-indulgence in his work, in the Machete films for example, are exactly the sort of projects he should be working on. He doesn’t need to be directing films that James Cameron never found the time to make. Cameron was fair-weather fan anyway, Battle Angel Alita was brought to his attention in 2000 by friend and fellow film maker Guillermo del Toro. I can’t help but think del Toro probably thought about the possibilities of adapting it but dismissed the idea for good reason – it’s not that great a story. I’m not a fan of the original MANGA but I have been aware of it since the early 90s. I read the first part of the Gunnm story and it didn’t grab me. I see the early 90s as the last golden age of comics, there were some brilliant stories being released, not just through MANGA and anime in general but across the board. There were far more interesting comics to spend my time with, as far as I was concerned, Battle Angel Alita was a poor mix of Rollerball, Frankenstein/Pinocchio and Pokemon. Obviously there was more to it than that but I really didn’t want to start something in the hope that it would get better. To give the film some credit, it has been around for a while and it has been a clear influence on other comics and films. Unfortunately, this means that the story feels less original than it really is, which ultimately left me cold, and a little bored. The film is set in 2563, 300 years after Earth is devastated by a catastrophic interplanetary war known as The Fall. We follow scientist Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) as he discovers a disembodied female cyborg in a pile of junk spat out by the floating Sky city above them. With some analysis, the Dr discovers a human brain inside the head unit, completely intact. Ido attaches a new cyborg body to the brain and names her Alita (played by a semi-CGI’ed Rosa Salazar) after his deceased daughter. Alita awakens with no memory of her past and tries to fit in as best she can with her surroundings. She meets a boy called Hugo who introduces her to Motorball, a battle royale racing sport played by cyborg gladiators. Hugo secretly robs cyborgs of their parts for Vector (Mahershala Ali) owner of the Motorball tournament. Stories circulate about a spell of murders around town and after becoming suspicious Alita follows Ido as he leaves the house in the middle of the night. They are soon ambushed by cyborg serial killers led by Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley). Ido is injured, and Alita instinctively fights using "Panzer Kunst" (a German expression, meaning "the art of the armor" literally "armor art"), a lost combat art for machine bodies. She kills two of the cyborgs and damages Grewishka, who retreats underground. Ido reveals that he is secretly a Hunter-Warrior. Grewishka goes to Dr. Chiren (Ido's estranged ex-wife played by Jennifer Connelly) for help, who is working for Vector. Despite Alita believing that fighting will help her rediscover her past, Ido discourages her from becoming a Hunter-Warrior. Later, Alita finds a highly advanced cyborg body in a crashed spaceship outside the city. Recognizing that the body is a Berserker — deadly shock troops of the enemy nation United Republics of Mars (URM) from the Great War — she asks Ido to install Alita in it but he refuses. Frustrated with Ido, Alita goes off by herself and registers as a Hunter-Warrior. At the Kansas Bar, she and Hugo are unable to recruit other Hunter-Warriors to her cause of taking down Grewishka. Zapan, a Hunter-Warrior, provokes Alita, and she severely beats him in a fight, triggering a chaotic bar brawl until Ido intervenes. An upgraded Grewishka arrives and challenges Alita to a duel, revealing that he has been sent by Zalem's technocrat overlord, Nova, to destroy her. Despite her courage and combat skills, Alita's body is sliced up by Grewishka's chain-bladed fingers, but Ido, Hugo and Hunter-Warrior McTeague arrive and force Grewishka to retreat. Ido apologizes and transplants Alita into the Berserker body. Having fallen in love with Hugo, Alita enters a Motorball tryout race for the prize money to send Hugo to Zalem. Hugo’s relationship with Alita leads him to decide to quit his secret job. He confronts Tanji, but Zapan appears, murdering Tanji and the cyborg and framing Hugo, though he escapes and calls Alita for help; she abandons the race and finds him just as Zapan does. Zapan mortally wounds Hugo but Dr. Chiren offers to save Hugo by attaching his severed head to Alita's life support system. When Zapan sees through the trick and attempts to stop Alita, the guard mech stops Zapan from stealing her claim on Hugo's bounty, and Alita seizes his prized Damascus blade and slices most of his face off. Ido transplants Hugo's head onto a cyborg body and tells Alita that Vector’s offer to help Hugo reach Zalem was a lie; as an exiled citizen of Zalem, Ido is certain that citizens of Iron City cannot enter Zalem unless becoming a motorball champion. Alita storms the factory and confronts Vector, who reveals that Chiren has been harvested for her organs. Vector summons Grewishka, but Alita’s new nanotechnological body allows her to easily destroy him. She forces Nova to speak to her through Vector. When Nova threatens to harm her friends, Alita fatally stabs Vector. Ido tells Alita that Hugo has fled to climb a cargo tube towards Zalem. Alita catches up to him and pleads with him to return with her. He agrees, but a serrated defense ring dropped by Nova shreds his body and throws him off the tube. Alita catches him but cannot pull him up, as his arm is breaking off. Hugo thanks Alita for saving him before falling to his death. Months later, Alita is the star of the Motorball tournament. Cheered on by the crowd, she pledges vengeance by pointing her sword toward Zalem, where Nova watches from above, smirking. I can’t see the appeal of being both a revolutionary and a sports star at the same time, it doesn’t really make sense to me. In the early 90s I was reading Zenith who was a pop star and a superhero, but it was a brilliant satire and there wasn’t any Rollerskating or cyborg nonsense. I read that it was Quentin Tarantino who suggested Christoph Waltz for the role of Dr. Dyson Ido, which is unsurprising but very lazy, given that he is essentially the same character he played in Tarantino’s Django. Rodriguez may have dabbled in the sickly world of CGI in the past but he really mastered it with Sin City. Sin City looks far better than Avatar in my opinion and I feel the Mexican director could be focusing his time and creativity on better, more personal projects. I like that they made Alita’s eyes bigger but overall nothing looks right. It doesn’t look like the original MANGA and it doesn’t even look anime. It’s a headache-inducing, projectile vomiting adventure in CGI, special effects over story with absolutely zero character development. I’m not apposed to ‘switching off and enjoying’ but it’s hard to enjoy watching something that treats one’s eyes with such aggression while treating one’s brain with complete contempt.