MOVIE REVIEW: Alita - Battle Angel

(Astronomy - Metallica)

James Cameron has developed a reputation for pushing visual effects in movies to their absolute limit.  Some of his landmark achievements have been films like Terminator 2 and Avatar.  Regardless of how you felt about the films themselves, no one argues that they're visually stunning.

His most recent project, Alita, promises another leap forward in the realm of blending CG characters with real-world footage, but only if you can get past the main character's eyes.

Not sure what I'm on about?  Check out the launch trailer:

The initial reactions to this trailer were, in my opinion, quite sad.  No one could get over the size of the main character's eyes, which had obviously been stylized to look like the manga source material they came from.  In response, the creators toned down the eyes a little, and then proceeded to drop a barrage of new trailers to showcase the fact that they'd listened to the vox populii. 

Months later, and Alita has finally arrived in theaters.  Is this film more than a hyper-realized set of eyeballs?

THE SHORT VERSION: 

Yes.  This is a very enjoyable, if predictable, movie.

THE LONG VERSION:

A quick note here, we were going to go see this on Friday evening, but a really bad winter storm swept into the area.  In a move that sort of surprised me, AMC actually closed down their theaters to keep their employees safe.  That's really cool!  I managed to sneak into a quick showing the following day though.

ONWARD!

First, let's address the eyeball thing.  I didn't really have a problem with the large eyes.  Honestly, no pun intended, I found them very soulful, which is a testament to even those early renderings.  The final version of her eyes in the movie is less jarring, to be sure, but I can understand the desire to make Alita's eyes more prominent.  They're one of the best parts of the entire film.  Rosa Salazar, the actor behind Alita, leverages them to convey a wide gamut of emotion throughout the film, and those big, beautiful eyes of hers are like a megaphone.  But more on that later.

Alita's story is that of an amnesiac teenage cyborg trying to rebuild her life in a world that isn't even remotely inclined to make that an easy job.  If you've watched any of the trailers, you know right where Alita fits into the story, and if you haven't watched any of the trailers, it won't take you long to pick up on the fact that she's a relic of war, a tool of destruction long-forgotten.  Her journey from the movie's opening scenes to the title card at the end sees a nearly full recovery of those memories, but it also sees a number of very awkward questions go unanswered.  I'll touch more on those later in the Spolers section.

The story in this movie isn't particularly original for anyone who has ever seen a Disney movie, but it's a pleasant enough experience to watch because of several members of its excellent cast.  In the role of the father figure is the always excellent Christoph Waltz, and one of the movie's main villains is Ed Skrein of 'Deadpool' and 'Game Of Thrones' fame.  Additional roles from Jennifer Connelly, Keean Johnson, and a criminally underutilized Jackie Earle Haley round the cast out to make the film very watchable, if not entirely original.  Salazar is clearly the star here though, and in the face of the massive obstacle that is the uncanny valley, she carries the whole movie off seemingly without effort.

With the possible exception of Visual Effects, Alita won't win any awards for movies in 2019, but it's very watchable and very enjoyable in spite of that.  In this day and age of everyone having an opinion, something simply being enjoyable is more than reason enough to see it.

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

There are a variety of questions that stick out in my head after having watched this movie.  Some of then are mild curiosities, while others are glaring plot holes.

- The business of the war between Mars and Earth is something that didn't have nearly enough story devoted to it.  Alita is an agent of Mars, and her mission clearly has to do with defeating an organization in power here on Earth, but without details from the war, you're left to wonder if she's even in the right.

- If URM-Tech is so good, how in the blue hell did Mars LOSE THE WAR?  They clearly had the tech to take down the other floating cities, so what's so special about Zolem, the last city in this movie?

- If URM Tech is so advanced, how the hell does Doc Ido know so much about it?

- Am I the only one that thinks Doc Ido would be a useless bounty hunter?  Yeah, he's got that really cool war pick, but...

- It would have been cool as hell for the Dog guy to have been John Wick and just lost his shit when one of his dogs gets killed...

- In the fight scene in the Underworld below Kansas, Alita just kind of...falls apart after she clearly dodges all of the grappling spikes being launched at her.  You know she has to end up in the Berserker suit sooner or later, but this is such weak tea...

- So...you're sort of led to believe that Alita is behaving like a teenager in the first half of the movie.  She's dressed like one, she behaves like one, and her body is one of modest proportions...but she's got the head of an adult.  Which is weird until she gets into the berserker body that enboobens itself to show that she's all grown up now.  Now, this transition to her being a grown-up works well enough, and her suddenly skin-tight clothing certainly reflects that, but upon reflection, it does sort of make the FIRST part of the movie really weird.  Because she's either an adult head on the body of an adolescent, or an adolescent head that will eventually end up on the body of an adult.  My wife tried to explain this away as something that's 'okay' and done quite a bit in manga and anime, but just because it's commonplace doesn't mean the concept isn't a little...creepy.

- For as nice a girl as Alita seems to be, she also seems to take to murder like a duck to a pond.  More than that, Doc Ido doesn't seem to have much trouble with it either.

- Why is Alita such a good person?  The movie tells us that she was a soldier and a military weapon, but it never explains why she's such a defender of the weak.

- ...Why...did she just wipe dog blood on her face??

- What, precisely is Motorball's connection to Zolem supposed to be?  Why do the Motorball winners get to go there?  It's a reward, sure, but why does Zolem give a shit?

- If URM Tech is so powerful, you're telling me that a bunch of scrubs from the streets of Iron City know there's a downed URM cruiser sitting in a lake, but the Big Bad Nova doesn't know?   I'm calling bullshit.

- In one scene, Doc Ido tells Alita that she needs nourishment to keep her human components alive, but if that's the case, how in the hell did she survive in a trash heap for several hundred years?  And how did the folks from Zolem not scour every single last INCH of that trash heap to find any leftover tech for use?

- Uh...where is Mars now?

SO many questions!!!!