But despite his renegade attitude, he knows how to make a conventionally satisfying studio film. Alita: Battle Angel is a major about-face for director Robert Rodriguez, who spent most of his career bucking the studio system in favor of low budget, imaginative independent projects. Fortunately, Waltz plays the part beautifully, and the image of the two-time Oscar-winner wielding a gigantic rocket-powered pickaxe never stops being fun. He’s Alita’s mentor, father, doctor, professor, and conscience, and that’s a tall order. Their story pops through the post-apocalyptic wasteland like a flower emerging from a concrete crack, and unfortunately, it’s just as likely to thrive.Īlita’s relationship with Ido is also emotional and warm, but poor Christoph Waltz gets sidelined with half the film’s exposition, so his character doesn’t get explored very much. Her earnest humanity gets fused over the course of the film into a solid warrior’s shell, but her scenes with her would-be boyfriend Hugo (Keean Johnson) have all the tenderness of a good YA adaptation. Though assisted by CGI limbs and artificially enhanced eyes, she imbues Alita with warmth and humanity. And at the center of it all, Rosa Salazar gives a phenomenal performance. You are transported to another, incredible landscape full of bizarre, intriguing minutiae. It’s that kind of wonderment that makes movies so magical in the first place. This is a vibrant, detailed world of cybernetic citizens and fascinating locations, simultaneously realistic and completely over the top. But although Alita: Battle Angel falls short of its intelligent, philosophical source material, it’s still an incredible production. So the film plays less like a powerful science-fiction story and more like a kick butt Hollywood blockbuster. The existential crisis at the center of the original story, in which Alita struggles to figure out who she is and where she comes from, gets resolved quickly, because everything has to be revealed in exposition dumps in order to get to the next amazing action sequence. It’s almost like binging the first third of a television series and then stopping suddenly, but Alita: Battle Angel is trapped in a 122-minute running time, so everything feels rushed. Alita rushes through one storyline, which builds to a giant climax, and then the film takes a breather while the next story ramps up to another big set piece, and then begins again. These events cover roughly the first four volumes of Battle Angel Alita, and although co-writers Laeta Kalogridis and James Cameron try to fit all those pieces together, the film has a very episodic structure. Along the way she runs afoul of the sinister Vector (Mahershala Ali) and his scientist Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), who run the “Motorball” races and dabble in kidnapping, mutilation and illegal scrap. Over the course of just one film, Alita investigates a serial killer, becomes a bounty hunter, falls in love, joins a deadly professional cyborg sporting league, and uncovers the truth about her existence. There’s enough story in Alita: Battle Angel to fill several movies. Nobody seems to know where she came from, why she’s so advanced, and why she’s an expert in a long-lost cyborg martial art. Ido wants Alita to find her own destiny, free of the baggage that comes with her high-tech body. Christoph Waltz co-stars as Ido, the kindly cyborg repairman who repairs Alita and becomes her surrogate father. The film, renamed Alita: Battle Angel, stars Rosa Salazar (Bird Box) as Alita, the amnesiac cyborg who views this dystopian world with wide-eyed wonder.
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