Future schlock
Stylish but shallow dystopian clunker, set ‘300 years after the fall,’ never gets its wings
Alita: Battle Angel is set in the far future.
We know this because it does all of those far-future things we’ve come to expect from science-fiction movies.
In the future, most people will have futuristic names such as Zapan or Vector or Dr. Dyson Ido, while others will go deliberately old-school, such as 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 very 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 wire-frame 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, and that 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.
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.
The film looks amazing, but 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.