Bullet Points: Alita: Battle Angel

Director Robert Rodriguez always seems to have the real gritty Grindhouse feel to his movies. Hell, he and his buddy Tarantino made a movie called “Grindhouse“. Alita: Battle Angel sure looks and feels different to a lot of those other things he’s been involved with throughout the years and I, for one, am happy since I’ve gotten a bit bored of that style.

Synopsis: A deactivated cyborg’s revived, but can’t remember anything of her past and goes on a quest to find out who she is.

• The World: I really enjoy movies that seem like they take place in a whole different place while still having enough familiarity that we don’t need too much info. Alita: BA feels like it takes place in a future Earth because it does. There was a massive war between us Earthlings and some sort of invading force from Mars and what is left of our world in a total mess. There were a number of floating cities in the sky that crashed down to Earth and only Zalem remained.
• The Cast: A massive reason why the film worked for me was that the cast was very good. Christoph Waltz took on the role of Dr. Ido after Tarantino recommended him to his buddy Robert. Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein, and Jackie Earle Haley round out the majority of the cast but the title character of Alita is played in all its CGI glory by the lovely Rosa Salazar. I wasn’t thrilled with the look of the character early in the film but it did start to grow on me the longer I watched. The backstory of Dr. Ido and Jennifer Connelly’s Chiren had some interesting bits in it but it’s all brushed over fairly quickly. If I had to criticize one thing about the cast it was that many of the coolest characters got very little screentime.

• The Sky City: Zalem is the last the sky cities falling “The Fall”. It’s been 300 years to this point since the shit hit the fan but the folks down here in Iron City are still fighting tooth and nail to get up into the mysterious place. It’s definitely one of the themes of the film and most of the characters are tied in some way to what is happening up above. It’s all rather interesting except that we never get to spend any time up there.
• Fighting Robots: Alita learns pretty quickly that she has some major skills when it comes to fighting. As she begins to uncover more and more about her past, she unlocks training (what the hell is Panzer Kunst?) and abilities that she never knew she had. Things get even more interesting when she finds a new body to replace the destroyed one left in the wake of her fight with the hulking Grewishka. For our purposes, though, the fight scenes might just be the coolest parts of the movie.

• The Baddies: Alita must unlock the secrets of her past if she want to build a future….or something like that. She’s a badass cyborg chick who Mary Sue’s her way into the futuristic and violent roller derby events and immediately becomes a big star. Robots and cyborgs just walk around and a great number of them hunt others for money. Pulling most of the strings, though, is supa bad guy Nova. While we don’t know much about him, he’s been around for a long time and is playing most of these other folks like a puppet master.
• Right in the Feels: Alita: BA tries its best to get you on board with the budding romance between Hugo and Alita. Not gonna like, it was a bit odd. It felt very unnatural to me and it could have just been the fact that the character was CGI but I never grew to like the relationship between the two. Hugo also wasn’t the most sympathetic of characters. In the end, the character and the film was better without him.

• Outlaw: Guns may be outlawed in the city but you can be a massive hulking cyborg with all sorts of blades and shit flying out of your fingers. Again, there is a lot to take in during the film and not all of it landed for me. The nature of the sport of Motorball, the bounty hunters and mercenaries fighting against their own kind, and the history behind the The Fall and the floating cities all seemed very interesting to me. We shall see if the questions asked are ever answered.

The Verdict: Alita: Battle Angel sure was a lot of fun. I had heard that this Robert Rodriguez film was like the Rodney Dangerfield of action/sci-fi flicks: gettin’ no respect. The thing that jumps out to you immediately is the effects of the main character. Is it a bit odd? Sure. It is something that grew on me as the movie went on but it did help that most of the characters were robotic in nature so Alita’s design wasn’t a total mess. What saves the film is the cool action sequences and the relationship between Dr. Ido and Alita. No one like world-building movies as much as me and Alita sets out to build a world without much payoff. I could see a sequel doing a lot of cool stuff in regards to the city in the sky but it seems we may never get that chance. Either way, a really cool flick that you should definitely check out.