DOES NOT COMPUTE
Scavenging story grabs pieces of old sci-fi movies, but the patchwork is just a pretty disappointment
Filmmaker James Cameron needs to put away his pen and stick to making stuff look spectacular on giant screens. His participation in the clanking bucket of bolts that is Alita:
Battle Angel, which he co-wrote and executive produced, is all the ammo I need for this argument.
The Canuck crafter of blockbuster amusements knows how to refloat the Titanic and to conjure up cat-faced blue aliens and shape-shifting killer robots. He’s great at this, and Alita is another showcase of his visual prowess. Sin City’s Robert Rodriguez is officially the director, and he’s certainly no stranger to violent eye candy, but Cameron’s paw prints are all over this picture. What Cameron is generally dismal at, with the exception of
Aliens and the first two Terminator movies, which were decades ago, is writing a screenplay that makes any sense.
Witness Alita: Battle Angel, which is as much a patchwork job as are its many cyborg characters. Randomly filching from Blade Runner, Metropolis, The Matrix, TRON, Rollerball and a teenage boy’s wet dreams, it’s more of a scavenger hunt than a movie.
It even has a major character, Christoph Waltz’s morose cyborg maker Dr. Dyson Ido, who moonlights as a junkyard scrounger in the ruined 26th-century metropolis of Iron City, a place still smouldering from an apocalyptic event call “the Fall,” which happened 300 years earlier.
That’s how Ido discovers the stilltwitching head and spine of the shattered ancient cyborg he’ll slip into a sleek suit of battle armour and christen Alita (Rosa Salazar). Couldn’t Ido just hire goons to do his grave-robbing, like his predecessor Dr. Frankenstein?
ALITA continued on E5
Let’s begin with the positives: Alita is really something to behold in IMAX 3D, which is how I saw it. Cameron has mastered the art of 3D more than any other filmmaker, delivering a viewing experience that is remarkably free of motion blur and headache triggers.
Salazar brings verve and rooting interest to her title character, even though she has cartoonishly huge eyes and she’s written with about as much backstory as a toaster. Alita learns on the fly that she has a “Berserker Body” — as per the lingo of Yukito Kishiro’s manga series, which the film is based on — and that she can slice up both humans and robots with her handy blade, even when they don’t deserve it.
She’s also quite adept at Motorball, an ultra-violent roller derby that will apparently be all the rage 544 years from now, although it resembles the old Wacky Races ’toons of the 1960s.
Another plus: Apparently there will be still be oranges in the year 2563, and there will still be water, sunshine and occasional patches of green grass.
Now for the negatives, which are many and mostly macho. The future world envisioned by Cameron, Rodriguez and their minions is a hellscape of arrested male development. Women may be considered equals to men in the butt-kicking department, but they’re still referred to as “sweetheart,” “cupcake” and “bitch” and they’re expected to don skin-tight outfits more appropriate to nocturnal emissions than scientific visions.
So much for human progress, but the narrative is even more stunted. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what Mahershala Ali and Jennifer Connelly are doing in this movie, although they do seem grimly invested. It has something to do with Motorball, stealing body parts and dressing in cool duds.
Alita, meanwhile, is trying to love a dull human named Hugo, a street punk played by Keean Johnson, an actor whom I suspect may actually be a robot.
Can cyborgs and humans find lasting affection? For the answer to this burning question, I direct you to Blade Runner and its sequel, which you’ll probably find more satisfying watching for the umpteenth time than watching Alita: Battle Angel for the first time.