Alita: Battle Angel is a 2019 American cyberpunk action film based on Yukito Kishiro's manga series Gunnm, also known as Battle Angel Alita. It was directed by Robert Rodriguez, written by James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, and produced by Cameron and Jon Landau. Rosa Salazar stars as Alita, a cyborg, with supporting roles portrayed by Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein, Jackie Earle Haley and Keean Johnson.
Cast:
Rosa Salazar as Alita, the titular cyborg heroine, revealed to be three centuries old and last of her kind.
Christoph Waltz as Dr. Dyson Ido, a renowned scientist, Hunter-Warrior and Alita's caretaker.
Keean Johnson as Hugo, Alita's love interest who also teaches her to play a gladiator-style game called Motorball.
Mahershala Ali as Vector, an entrepreneur who rigs Motorball combat matches.
Jennifer Connelly as Chiren, Ido's ex-wife who was expelled with him and their daughter from the false utopia of Zalem and dreams of returning.
Ed Skrein as Zapan, a cyborg bounty hunter tasked with tracking down and killing Alita.
Jackie Earle Haley as Grewishka, a huge cyborg who works for Nova as his personal assassin, based on Grewcica from the Battle Angel OVA.
Jorge Lendeborg Jr. as Tanji, a friend of Hugo's.
Lana Condor as Koyomi, a friend of Hugo's.
Eiza González as Nyssiana, a cyborg assassin with a bounty on her head.
Idara Victor as Nurse Gerhad, Ido's aide.
Jeff Fahey as McTeague, a Hunter-Warrior who leads a pack of robotic dogs.
Rick Yune as Master Clive Lee, a Hunter-Warior who claims a record of over 200 kills.
Marko Zaror as Ajakutty, a Motorball player.
Elle LaMont as Screwhead, a female Hunter-Warrior.
Leonard Wu as Kinuba, a Motorball player.
Casper Van Dien as Amok
In uncredited roles, Edward Norton appears as Nova, a Zalem scientist who has the ability to transfer his consciousness into other people's bodies; Michelle Rodriguez appears as Gelda, a cyborg warrior from Mars who trained Alita; and Jai Courtney cameos as Jashugan, a Motorball Champion.
Plot:
In 2563, a catastrophic war known as "The Fall" has left Earth devastated. While scouting the junkyard metropolis of Iron City, cyborg scientist Dr. Dyson Ido discovers a disembodied female cyborg with a fully intact human brain. Ido rebuilds the cyborg, who does not have any recollections of her past, and names her "Alita" after his deceased daughter.
Alita befriends Hugo, who dreams of moving to the wealthy sky city of Zalem. Hugo introduces her to the competitive sport of Motorball, a battle royale race wherein cyborgs fight to the death.
Alita discovers that Ido is a Hunter-Warrior when she follows him one night and they encounter three cyborg assassins led by Grewishka. When Ido is injured, Alita instinctively attacks the cyborgs, killing two of them and severely damaging Grewishka, who retreats underground. Despite Alita rediscovering her skill in the ancient martial art of "Panzer Kunst", Ido discourages her from becoming a Hunter-Warrior. The next day, Alita finds and brings home a Berserker body from an old downed ship outside the city. Ido refuses to install her in the body, fearing the consequences of her heart's full compatibility with it.
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| Alita ain't takin' no shit from some wannabe RoboCop looking cyborg. |
Fed up with Ido, Alita registers herself as a Hunter-Warrior, then she and Hugo enter the Kansas Bar to ask other Hunter-Warriors in helping her take down Grewishka, but they refuse, as Grewishka is not on the wanted list. Suddenly, an upgraded Grewishka storms into the bar and challenges Alita to a rematch, revealing that he has been sent by his boss, Nova, to destroy her. Despite her courage and combat skills, Alita's body is sliced up by Grewishka's bladed fingers before she blinds him with her left arm, and Ido, Hugo, and another Hunter-Warrior force him to retreat. Ido transplants Alita in the Berserker body, which automatically interfaces with her system.
Having fallen in love with Hugo, Alita enters a Motorball tryout race as a means to send Hugo to Zalem. Ido discovers that the other contestants are Hunter-Warriors and wanted cyborgs hired by Vector, an entrepreneur working under Nova, to kill her. He warns Alita, and as the race begins, she destroys many of the contestants with her superior skills. Meanwhile, Hugo is being hunted by Zapan after he frames Hugo for murdering a cyborg. Hugo calls Alita for help and she leaves the Motorball race to rescue him. She finds Hugo just as Zapan arrives and reveals to her that Hugo has been attacking cyborgs and stealing their parts for Vector for use in his Motorball games. Knowing that Alita is in love with Hugo, Zapan mortally wounds him and tells Alita that Hunter-Warrior law dictates that she must either kill Hugo or let Zapan finish him off. Chiren, Ido's ex-wife and also a master cyborg engineer, manages to save Hugo by attaching his head to Alita's heart. Zapan attempts to stop Alita from leaving and she slices part of his face off with his prized sword, which she takes with her.
Ido transplants Hugo's head onto a cyborg body before telling Alita that Hugo's actions were based upon the false belief that he would be able to eventually buy his way into Zalem. Ido confides that this was a lie fabricated by Vector, and that citizens of Iron City cannot enter Zalem unless they become Motorball champion. Alita decides to confront Vector, who is being mind-controlled by Nova, a powerful Zalem scientist. Through Vector, Nova reveals to Alita that Chiren has been harvested for her organs and then orders Grewishka to kill her. Alita battles Grewishka again and finally kills him, then stabs Vector, telling Nova that he made the mistake of underestimating her.
Ido tells Alita that Hugo has fled and is desperately attempting to climb a factory tube towards Zalem. Alita pleads with Hugo to return with her, but a massive spiked defense ring set off by Nova shreds Hugo's body and throws him into the air. Leaping after him, Alita is unable to prevent Hugo from falling to his death, but not before he can thank her for changing him.
Months later, Alita is the star athlete of the Motorball tournament. As the crowd cheers, she points her sword towards Zalem while Nova watches her from above.
The Verdict:
I'm going to start off with this statement - I didn't NOT read the manga but I did watch the two episode Gunnm/Battle Angel OVA prior to seeing this in the theater. While I watched this in English dub on YouTube, I have linked the original Japanese dub with English subtitles below. No idea when YouTube's pesky algorithms will take this down though.
Visuals
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| Alita from both the OVA anime (left) and in the film (right). |
Let's go ahead and address the elephant in the room and point out how "freaky" Alita's eyes are in this. It bothered me when I saw the initial trailers for this film, but I understand why this film went with this visual style in regard of paying homage/respect to the source material. Once the film got rolling along though, it didn't bother me at all to be honest.
Simply put, this movie is stunning to look at. I watched it in standard definition, but I would like to assume that the 3D showings would be described as "visual crack". I would expect that a lot of this world would look like the actors are standing in front of a green screen for most of production, but the visuals here are pulled off masterfully without a hitch.
Off-topic, but goddamn those Motorball sequences made me really want to see how a live-action version of IGPX (Immortal Grand Prix) would fair as a CGI-made film. I know, I know. Wishful thinking there when Toonami/Cartoon Network really never profited off of that series, despite how much of their own dough they put into helping create it...
Fans of both the manga and the OVA will be pleased that this film recreates a lot of key scenes from the source material in this film, down to the smallest detail. I'm going to discuss this more in-depth when I get to covering the film's narrative below, but there were points where I felt the film was so caught up in recreating these straight-from-the-source visuals to it's own detriment.
At the end of the day, all of these pretty visuals aren't going to mean jack shit if the story that binds it all together isn't worth a damn.
Narrative
Another elephant in the room that I'm going to address right off the bat is that this film splices and reorders a lot of content from the manga and two episode anime OVA while reordering those events to set up what seems to be a trilogy for this film. At the core, that's this film's biggest problem. The whole time I found myself in familiar territory with a lot of deja vu here since having watched the OVA the night prior while simultaneously wondering if I needed to read the manga for the stuff that was flying over my head. FYI I never read the manga (which is surprisingly still ongoing BTW) but after seeing this film makes me wish that I had.
I was fascinated to Alita's ties to the mysterious war that left their world in the state that it's in and the part that she played in it, but the film immediately throws it's first massive plot hole in that regard by saying those events were over 300 years ago. In that case, Alita's remains wouldn't have been at the top of the piles of trash, she would have been buried at least a few miles underground from all that have accumulated over time. Between that and the sheer convenience that she was able to stumble across the Berserker body that no one was able to access in that ship other than her - not to mention that if Alita was sitting around as spare parts for that long, then why not hasn't anyone ripped out her power source if it was so rare and valuable? You would think that would be the first thing that poachers and scavengers such as Ido would have stumbled across over the years.
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| I swear this scene was the definition of cringe to the tee... |
In all seriousness, I don't think Hugo and Alita's relationship wouldn't have been so cringe-worthy if it didn't feel so forced. He's there as one of the first guys she sees when she goes out with Ido for the first time out into the city. The OVA did this comically bad as well, having them meet each other for the first time as he's working on the roof of Ido's workshop. Hugo had some really bad lines to boot, even though some of them were ripped straight from the OVA in some occasions. I just wished they scratched out the line about Alita being the most human person that he's ever met. At that point, that's when and where I mentally checked out on their relationship in terms of caring. I get what the narrative was trying to do here and in the OVA, attempting to paint the picture of a redemption story for Hugo as he merely wants to move up and out of the slums of society and out of poverty by buying his way into Zalem, but that ends up being a pipe dream as he's being manipulated by Vector.
I was glad to see Mahershala Ali as Vector here, even though I still get mad thinking back how he got the shaft by being killed off in the first season of Luke Cage as Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes. He was the right actor to bring that character to life, even though he was a tool to Nova's ambitions. Vector isn't killed off so early in the manga, but he is met with a similar fate at the hands of Ido in the OVA. Jennifer Connelly ( who which most savvy Marvel Cinematic Universe fans may recognize her voice as "Karen" in Spider-Man: Homecoming) as Dr. Chiren works, but from how easily as forgettable as Chiren in the OVA, I'm surprised that she was cast in this adaptation since she's a character that doesn't exist in the manga to my knowledge. She is played up as Ido's bitter ex-wife and rival in their profession as scientists. Additionally, she was exiled from Zalem like Ido in the past and desperately longs to return to their homeland - by any means necessary. I felt that she was merely here just to point out the comparisons between Alita and their deceased daughter - hence why Ido fished her out of the wreckage and rebuilt her in the first place. I did feel sorry for her only getting what she wanted when Vector killed her and harvested her brain and vital organs for parts to be shipped to Zalem.
The surrogate father-daughter relationship works for me between Ido and Alita and came off a lot more believable than how forced Hugo and Alita's romance was. After arguing with Ido about using her capabilities and skills to become a Hunter-Warrior, Alita goes through her whole rebellious, teen angst phase until she's struck down by Grewishka. Ido naturally cares for Alita as if she's his own daughter that was killed in cold blood years prior. His motivations actually make sense - he refused to put Alita into the Berserker body since he felt that he was protecting her from her destructive past. He didn't want to lose her to senseless violence like so many to being a Hunter-Warrior. He merely became one to satisfy his own lust for revenge for what the cyborg that murdered his daughter did. When he wasn't satisfied in that kill, he only kept doing it for no one else would have to endure the same pain and loss that he went through with his own daughter's demise. Ido felt like he was protecting Alita from this fate when in reality he was denying her from having a choice to decide her own fate. That journey made for a much entertaining narrative than the romance between Hugo and Alita that was shoe-horned into this film just to add to the runtime. I'm sure that fans of the original OVA could see that they were leading to Hugo's iconic (if you can call it that) demise without a hitch and I don't know why the writers just didn't save it for the obvious sequel to this film. It's not like they aren't a stranger to picking and choosing what to include or reordering events, such as the whole Motorball thing that's not referenced in the manga right off the bat.
I really enjoyed the world building that they peppered throughout the film's runtime too with Alita's ties to the war that led to the events of "The Fall" and how she had connections to Zalem before Ido found her wasting away in that scrapyard. My only complaint is that exposition and revelations to Alita's past came up a little too convenient at times, such as when Hugo and his friends took Alita to the downed Martian spacecraft that just happened to have the Berserker body that she could interface with. Like I mentioned earlier, these flashbacks ultimately end up being to the film's detriment as it seems to be setting up for a much better film than this one that we're originally presented with. I found it ironic that James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez both mentioned in interviews that they weren't thinking about sequels as they were thinking of this film as a one shot/stand alone and I'm sitting here going there's no way from how much stuff that they brought to the table in this film and don't really elaborate nor explain in this film that is obviously setting up for a sequel or two. For Christ's sake, Alita doesn't even physically confront the true mastermind behind the attacks against her and her friends, Nova himself. Sure, they have that one conversation while he was "speaking" through Vector's body but that doesn't count in the least. The film ends with Alita still defiant as ever, looking up to Zalem as if to challenge Nova down the road. You have to be crazy to not realize that wasn't setting up a sequel in some fashion. One may point out that the OVA ends in the same manner after Ido and Alita have a funeral to say their goodbyes to the departed Chiren and Hugo, but in that case, there were no desires by Gunnm/Battle Angel's creator to do anything further with the anime nor to revisit it. In this scenario, it's obvious that Robert Rodriguez and especially James Cameron - both of which who are notorious for trilogies - want to make a franchise of sorts with this.
What's even more ironic? As this posting (2/25/18), Robert Rodriguez is already down as a lock in the short list of directors for the possible sequel to this film.
Watch It or Don't Bother?
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| This image is symbolic to how I felt about this film as a whole - lots of flashy action and visually stunning to behold, but ultimately falls short of being something truly special. |
I want this film to do well in the box office though, only for we can see Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron continue their cinematic vision for this narrative.
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