12 Mar 2019

Review: Alita- Battle Angel

From Widescreen, 1:33 pm on 12 March 2019

Timed perfectly to slip in under cover of the multiple Captain Marvel reviews appearing in outlets big and small, here’s Dan Slevin’s review of the other giant superhero fantasy film featuring a female lead that you can see on the big screens at the moment.

With digital enhancements from Weta in Wellington, Rosa Salazar is Alita in Robert Rodrguez’s Alita: Battle Angel.

With digital enhancements from Weta in Wellington, Rosa Salazar is Alita in Robert Rodrguez’s Alita: Battle Angel. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Alita: Battle Angel emerges from a different wellspring than the Marvel Marvel. It’s a manga adaptation – originally known as 銃夢 or Gunnm (or Gun Dream) – that first appeared back in 1990 and it exists on screen thanks to the perseverance and resourcefulness of Lightstorm’s James Cameron who was originally going to direct it himself until he got waylaid by the endless Avatar project.

Instead, he’s handed it off to the Texan equivalent of Peter Jackson, Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado, Sin City) who shot the film at his home base in Austin, Texas with the considerable technical support of Weta in Wellington (who use their performance capture technology to help create a slightly-more-believable-than-usual digital human).

I called it a superhero film earlier on (Wikipedia prefers “cyberpunk action film”) because the lead character wears a lot of lycra, has exceptional powers, is eventually going to save humanity and this is an origin story. That’s close enough for me. Alita (Rosa Salazar) is a cyborg, discovered in a rubbish tip several hundred years in the future. Doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) – possibly renamed from his original Japanese character in honour of the great vacuum cleaner engineer – is scrounging for spare parts so he can continue to repair the many cyborgs on Earth who seek out his services. Body augmentation for necessity, fun and profit is a big deal in this era.

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Photo: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Alita is something special. She can’t remember anything of her past existence but appears to have remnants of some tremendous fighting skills – skills that might make her a star of the local ‘fight to the death’ sport Motorball or maybe even the key to overthrowing Nova, the boss of the floating city of Zalem where everybody wants to go but nobody ever does.

This is all a foundation for lots of long action sequences which Rodriguez manages very capably and a fair few bits of exposition which slow things down. What there isn’t very much of is character development. Like most Cameron productions, plot drives everything often sacrificing recognisable human emotional logic in the process.

The big roll of the dice for Cameron, Rodriguez and Weta is the hope that the ending – and the box office – will justify extension into sequels-ville and Franchise City but that play started well before Fox was bought by Disney and the decision makers changed. Cameron can’t rely on Rupert Murdoch any longer. Disney have plenty of options for where they spend a billion dollars now.

Technically, Alita is quite an achievement and it’s the second film I’ve seen this year which I wished I had seen in 3D (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was the first).

Alita (Rosa Salazar) surveys her new - enhanced - body in Alita: Battle Angel,

Alita (Rosa Salazar) surveys her new - enhanced - body in Alita: Battle Angel, Photo: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

One final observation: Alita wears clothes whenever she is in public – presumably to disguise the awesomeness of her robotic body – but when she is walking around the house she is, how to put this, naked. Shiny metallic naked but naked nonetheless. Oh well, it felt odd to me.

Alita: Battle Angel is still playing on whatever screens are left over in New Zealand after Captain Marvel has colonised them.

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