I’ve been hankering for a
proper anime adaptation for as long as I’ve been a fan of the medium. There have been multiple attempts, but they’ve all fallen short, mostly because the filmmakers
either didn’t care or didn’t understand the source material. Ghost
in the Shell had a lot of promise but was pretty dull, not helped by
the white-washed casting and a tone-deaf ending. Death
Note seemed like it would make the easiest cultural transition, but
even that was botched. And the less said about Dragon Ball: Evolution, the better. In comes Alita: Battle Angel, a passion project from James Cameron three
decades in the making. Adapted from the popular cyberpunk manga by Yukito Kishiro,
Cameron has been trying to get this film off the ground ever since Guillermo
Del Toro introduced the manga to him in the late 90’s. In fact, the CGI motion
capture technology developed for this project was tested on Avatar, and when that became the highest
grossing movie of all time, it essentially gave him carte blanche to put it in
motion. With the help of Robert Rodriguez, a jack-of-all-trades filmmaker who specializes
in making this kind of pulpy material work, and Weta Workshop, the special
effects wonder house that brought Lord of
the Rings to life, and the result is something to behold.
Our story is set five-hundred
years in the future in Iron City, a rusted metropolis built from the discarded
scraps of Zalem, a floating technologically advanced utopia that hovers above Iron
City both literally and figuratively, forcing its denizens to do all its grunt
work. One day, a cybernetics engineer named Dr. Ito (Christoph Waltz) is
digging through the scraps for new parts when finds the half-dismembered
remains of a young cyborg (Rosa Salazar) with a still-functioning brain and
heart. He takes her home, rebuilds her body, and gives her a name: Alita. When
she awakes, Alita can’t remember anything about who she is, where she came from
or what happened to her. She does learn that when put in danger, she suddenly
becomes a lightning fast killing machine. She sets out to find answers, a
mission that leads her to join a league of bounty hunters, fall in love with Hugo
(Keean Johnson), a dashing young street kid with a hidden secret, and take part
in a gladiatorial bloodsport called motorball (think an ultraviolent mix of NASCAR
and roller derby) as a means of making her way up to Zalem.
Alita:
Battle Angel is a lot to take in, and as a result it can
often feel like a mess. It has a lot of the same problems that Avatar did: about half the screen time
is dedicated to exposition, it throws a ton of technical jargon at you with
little explanation, it has about seven false ending and a definitive sequel baiting
one, and while there’s an abundance of plot and worldbuilding, the core story
is fairly basic. If those things were obstacles for your enjoyment of Avatar, Alita probably won’t do much to
assuage those issues. With that said, Alita has all the charm and sincerity
that could only come from a passion project of this magnitude. It combines some
of the greatest aspect of its two main creative minds: James Cameron’s mastery
of merging groundbreaking special effects with live-action, and Robert Rodriguez’s
gonzo, go-for-broke grindhouse directing style. The end result is Rodriguez’s
best movie since probably Machete,
and probably the most technically ambitious movie in Cameron’s entire career.
It is first and foremost a
special effects extravaganza, and since James Cameron practically wrote the
book on integrating CGI with live action footage, it looks amazing. Iron City
is this massive, textile place inhabited by a hodgepodge of cyborgs that look like
they leapt off the shelves of a 90’s toy store. It’s especially impressive when
these mechanical men throw down in any of its many spectacular fight scenes. Ripped
from the pages of the manga and choreographed by the same people who conducted
the action in The Matrix, Battle Angel
manages to get away with a ton of gratuitous violence and dismemberment and still
get a PG-13 rating simply by virtue of most of its combatants being half robot.
Some of the highlights include Alita singlehandedly taking down a dive bar full
of cyborg bounty hunters, a one-on-one brawl between her and Grewishka, a
hulking monstrosity play unrecognizably by Jackie Earle Haley, and a high-speed
motorball game that veers off the track after a price is put on her head.
One thing that was a point of
contention ever since the first trailers was Alita’s massive CG anime eyes.
While they are a bit unsettling at first, you get used to them pretty quickly,
and in some cases, they even help enhance the character. Rosa Salazar is given
the unenviable task of bringing this character to life under all those pixels,
and since she’s an incredibly expressive actress, those gigantic fishbowl eyes
help make her expressiveness all the more apparent. The whole amnesia plot
chestnut is a decent excuse for her to learn about this world along with the audience,
gazing wide-eyed at the grungy techno metropolis. Christoph Waltz also does astoundingly
well as Dr. Ido, who pulls triple duty as overprotective father figure, exposition
dispenser and cybernetics doctor who moonlights as a bounty hunter whose weapon
of choice is a rocket powered sledgehammer. The rest of the cast is rounded out
by a murderer’s row of character actors like Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer
Connelly, Ed Skrein and Mahershala Ali that both understand and revel in this
kind of material. If there’s a weak link, it’s Keean Johnson as love interest
Hugo, whose only memorable characteristic is that he rides a motorcycle with
one giant wheel.
Bottom line, while it’s not
something everyone will be able to groove on, as the widening gap between
critical and audience reception more than shows, Alita: Battle Angel is truly something to behold. The seams in the
plot are pretty noticeable and it gets dangerously corny at times, but I was
never bored and what it lacks in coherency it makes up for in passion and
spectacle. You don’t dedicate thirty years and 200 million dollars to something
unless you’re completely committed to it, and that passion can be contagious. It’s
probably doomed to fail at the box office, and unless it does well in China, we’ll
most likely never going to see that promised sequel. Hopefully it’ll find its
audience later down the line, because movies like this deserve to succeed.
7/10
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