Geek Oasis - Issue 01 Unit 28 Afes D.-Task 2-Interactive PDF | Page 15

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.
”
destiny, free of the baggage that comes
with her high-tech body. Nobody seems
to know where she came from, why
she’s so advanced, and why she’s an ex-
pert in a long-lost cyborg martial art.
There’s enough story in Alita: Battle
Angel to fill several movies. Over the
course of just one film, Alita investi-
gates a serial killer, becomes a bounty
hunter, falls in love, joins a deadly pro-
fessional cyborg sporting league, and
uncovers the truth about her existence.
Along the way she runs afoul of the sin-
ister Vector (Mahershala Ali) and his
scientist Chiren (Jennifer Connelly),
who run the “Motorball” races and dab-
ble in kidnapping, mutilation and illegal
scrap.
These events cover roughly the first
four volumes of Battle Angel Alita,
and although co-writers Laeta Kalog-
ridis and James Cameron try to fit all
those pieces together, the film has a
very episodic structure. 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.
It’s almost like binging the first third
of a television series and then stop-
ping suddenly, but Alita: Battle Angel
is trapped in a 122-minute running
time, so everything feels rushed. 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, be-
cause everything has to be revealed
in exposition dumps in order to get to
the next amazing action sequence. So
the film plays less like a powerful sci-
ence-fiction story and more like a kick
butt Hollywood blockbuster.
But although Alita: Battle Angel falls
short of its intelligent, philosophical
source material, it’s still an incredible
production. This is a vibrant, detailed
world of cybernetic citizens and fas-
cinating locations, simultaneously re-
alistic and completely over the top. It’s
that kind of wonderment that makes
movies so magical in the first place.
You are transported to another, incredi-
ble landscape full of bizarre, intriguing
minutiae. Alita is a wonder to behold.
And at the center of it all, Rosa Sala-
zar gives a phenomenal performance.
Though assisted by CGI limbs and ar-
tificially enhanced eyes, she imbues
Alita with warmth and humanity. 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. 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. Alita’s relationship with Ido is
also em
otional and warm, but poor Christoph
Waltz gets sidelined with half the film’s
exposition, so his character doesn’t
get explored very much. He’s Alita’s
mentor, father, doctor, professor, and
conscience, and that’s a tall order.
Fortunately, Waltz plays the part beau-
tifully, and the image of the two-time
Oscar-winner wielding a gigantic rock-
et-powered pickaxe never stops being
fun.
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 bud-
get, imaginative independent projects.
But despite his renegade attitude, he
knows how to make a conventionally
satisfying studio film. What’s more, his
flair for eccentricity and taste for out-
landish action makes Alita feel like an
honest attempt to produce something
exciting and new, in a climate where
many other giant CGI spectacle films
often seem homogenized and familiar.
And although Alita: Battle Angel
doesn’t reach the artistic, emotional
and thematic level of the manga, it’s a
noble attempt to translate Yukito Kishi-
ro’s work into a cinematic medium. In
the filmmaker’s zeal to put as much of
the manga on screen as possible, they
left out the quieter moments that gave
all these amazing incidents a greater
meaning. But everything that did make
it into the movie is, at least, incredibly
cool.
THE VERDICT
Alita: Battle Angel is Robert Rodriguez’s
best film in many years. It’s an ambi-
tious, impressive, visually spectacular
production with great performances
that make its strange world seem real.
It’s a shame that, by trying to adapt as
much of th e original manga as possi-
ble, the filmmakers left out most of the
intelligent commentary that made “Ali-
ta” so powerful in the first place. This is
a classic story, and it’s been turned into
a film that’s merely very entertaining.
SCORE : 8/10
WILLIAM BIBBIANI
FEB 13TH, 2019
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