Review: Alita: Battle Angel
Based on the popular manga/anime, Alita: Battle Angel, directed by Robert Rodriguez, tells the tale of a young but fierce cyborg named Alita (Rosa Salazar) searching for answers of her past and purpose in the lowly slums of Iron City. With the help of colorful supporting characters like Dr. Ido (Christoph Waltz), a cyborg doctor who found Alita, and Hugo (Keean Johnson), a spunky young lad who befriends Alita, Alita adjusts to her new life in this dangerous world run by evil men in high places and sets the course for her own destiny along the way.
Now I was very intrigued by this film seeing as how it remained in the deepest, darkest pits of development hell for quite sometime. This film was written and produced by James Cameron of Titanic and Avatar fame. Cameron was initially set to direct this film but dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. The trailers for this film didn’t really look all too promising, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt considering its talented cast and crew. After giving this film a shot I was pretty underwhelmed, but in all fairness Alita didn’t turn out to be the train-wreck many people expected it to be.
The one aspect this film has going for it is the visuals. This film was a very pretty looking film. Iron City is just teeming with life and has such a personality in every street corner. The CGI is top notch; Alita herself looks surprisingly real when side by side with her live action co-stars. The action was also a lot of undeniable fun. Director Rodriguez utilizes everything he knows and understands about film and gives us some of the most visually stunning action sequences I’ve seen so far this year. And that’s about all I enjoyed from this film; the rest of it was pretty bland and generic.
James Cameron can be a great director in his own right, but when it comes to writing his shortcomings are made incredibly apparent, and this film (which he co-wrote with Laeta Kalogridis) doesn’t really do much to change that fact. The writing was just really laughable; a lot of lines of dialogue were either way too corny to take seriously or used to sloppily give us exposition. Alita herself isn’t much of an interesting protagonist; as much as Rosa Salazar tries there’s just nothing in Alita’s character for her to work off of.
The rest of the cast’s performances were either pretty bad or incredibly restrained. Christoph Waltz was basically phoning it in all the way, Jennifer Connelly was just there, Keean Johnson was notably bad, Mahershala Ali was also just there, even Jackie Earle Haley, who is usually fun to watch just for how over the top he can get, is noticeably restrained in this film. The plot, outside of some notably dumb and illogical moments, was overall just fine, the romance between Alita and Hugo bogged the whole film down, the music was fine, and the sequel set-up throughout the film was kinda annoying.
Overall I can say it’s not as bad as I originally thought it would be, but it’s not really a good movie either. The film is doing pretty bad at the box office so chances of a sequel is unlikely, which makes all the sequel set-up even more annoying. If you’re in the mood for some glorious 3D eye-candy and don’t care about the story too much then you’ll probably like this film fine. This is another one of those films where all the critics didn’t like but everyone else loved so hey maybe you’ll actually like this film. As for me, however, this film ultimately turned out to be just another big budget blockbuster that’s been done better in other films. Check it out if you want, but it’s just not my cup of tea.
Final Verdict: 5/10