Future schlock
Stylish but shallow dystopian clunker, Alita: Battle Angel never gets its wings
Alita: Battle Angel is set in the far future. We know this because it does all those far-future things we’ve come to expect from science-fiction movies.
In the future, most people will have futuristic names like Zapan or Vector or Dr. Dyson Ido, while others will go deliberately old school, like Hugo. The ruling elite will live in a shiny, floating metropolis while the hoi polloi scratch about on the ground and barter for oranges and hemp, the Earth having become a giant, irradiated farmers’ market. Oh, and there will be a violent gladiatorial game played on roller skates.
But Alita: Battle Angel is specific about its time frame. After the amusing “26th Century Fox” logo — don’t they know they’ll be Disney before the year is out? — the movie informs us that it’s 2563, “300 years after the fall.” So, about mid-june or so.
Christoph Waltz is the aforementioned Dr. Ido. In his wireframe glasses and fedora he looks a bit like Indiana Jones; even more so in his first scene, which finds him poking through a trash heap in search of interesting tech for his robot repair shop. He finds Alita, a cyborg played in a motion-capture performance by Rosa Salazar. With her huge, wide-set eyes and appealing overbite, she looks like a young Amanda Seyfried.
Alita has few memories, which allows the writers — James “producer” Cameron, Robert “director” Rodriguez and Laeta “just a writer” Kalogridis — to fill in all kinds of background details with, it must be said, a rather heavy hand. But there’s a lot to catch up on, 544 years hence. Dyson has a history with Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), who now works for Vector (Mahershala Ali) running the Motorball games that are one of this society’s main activities. The other is bounty hunting, presumably of those who don’t settle their Motorball bets in a timely fashion.
Alita quickly relearns the concept of love after meeting local gadabout Hugo (Keean Johnson), while her muscle memories of battle techniques are reawakened by some of the anti-cyborg thugs she meets in the streets of Iron City. She also has flashbacks to space battles that had me convinced she was remembering some of the cheesier scenes from Moonraker.
Cameron and Rodriguez seem to have sunk most of their estimated $200-million budget into creating a fully realized sci-fi dystopia. Even Salazar fits the bill, having previously occupied minor roles in both the Maze Runner and Divergent trilogies.
Alas, while the film looks amazing, it’s all style and no substance, stocked with cardboard villains speaking wooden dialogue, their motivations either blindingly obvious or just never revealed at all. As for romance, let’s just say that when a cyborg offers you her heart, she’s not kidding.
The young leads are unevenly matched, but I’m not sure it’s the actors’ fault. Alita has a destiny to uncover, and a team of animators working to tweak her performance, while Hugo just looks like he’s concentrating on keeping his hair perfect in every scene.
And while Waltz as Alita’s foster father brings his inimitable Austrian vocal precision to such jargon as “panzer kunst fighting style” and “URM berserker,” even he can’t make it sound like more than a placeholder for better ideas that never quite arrive.
By the end of two hours I was ready for the movie to end, and yet I was still disappointed when it did, because it left so many unanswered questions. The filmmakers are clearly angling to make a sequel — you don’t stick THAT actor (I won’t say who) in the last five seconds of the film for any other reason. But I’d like it to be no more than 10 minutes long, just enough to tie up those loose ends.