ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL
The ’Borg Identity…
Rodriguez and Cameron land in uncanny valley.
James Cameron has been trying to get cyberpunk manga Battle Angel Alita on to the big screen for nigh on two decades. Side-tracked by the Avatar industry, he passed the reins to Robert Rodriguez, while retaining a producer role. It certainly feels more in Cameron’s wheelhouse than Rodriguez’s: epic sci-fi, with boundary-straining VFX. But, like its titular character, the film is a visually impressive marvel that lacks substance.
Discovered on an Iron City scrapheap and brought to life by cyborg doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), Alita (Rosa Salazar) is a remarkable piece of digital rendering, though she doesn’t entirely evade the uncannyvalley effect. To Salazar’s credit there’s something likeable and determined about Alita, but the CGI puts an emotional forcefield around her.
In Iron City, Alita falls for local boy Hugo (Keean Johnson) and encounters Vector (Mahershala Ali), who trades cyborg players for a brutal sport called Motorball. Plus danger lurks from CertifiCate 12A DireCtor Robert Rodriguez Starring Rosa Salazar SCreenplay James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis, Robert Rodriguez DiStribution 20th Century Fox running time 122 mins
Hunter-Warriors, man-machine hybrids chasing bounties for credits.
Sets and CGI combine harmoniously, and the mechanically augmented humans are similarly seamless.
The problem is Battle Angel doesn’t nail the story and character elements needed to bank your investment in its world. The players are little more than ciphers, the cast often saddled with clunky exposition. There’s a couple of well-staged dust-ups and set-pieces, but these are fleeting distractions in a story that’s hard to care about. It also wobbles awkwardly between gritty and absurd, with frequent unintentional laughs. The result is a bizarre mishmash desperate to set itself up for a sequel, though it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to spend much more time in this world. Matt Maytum
tHe VeRDiCt
Impressive VFX can’t salvage a muddled start for a franchise, made of scrap parts put to better use elsewhere.