On the Big Screen: ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (2019)

Robert Rodriguez, once known for making exciting films on the cheap, had a ton of money thrown at him by James Cameron in order to realize a project that had been stewing in the latter's mind for about twenty years. Wikipedia reports that Cameron had been turned on to Yukito Kishiro's manga by Guillermo del Toro, but del Toro by now is too big a deal himself to be anyone else's hired gun. Rodriguez did an uncredited polish on a screenplay Cameron collaborated on, so the finished product is as much his interpretation of the story as anyone's. He deserves credit for how well it turned out, and I suspect that Alita will prove a no-lose proposition for him, since those who don't like it will most likely blame Cameron. I suspect a lot of people won't like it, and I'm not sure I can blame anyone who doesn't. It's not for everyone, even if it needs to be to break even; it lacks that jenesaisquois that makes Star Wars almost uniquely accessible to the mass audience for stuff of this kind. There's an audience guaranteed to enjoy this, but another more certainly guaranteed to resent its story's demands on their attention -- and a lot of them write film reviews.

While Alita is undeniably a work of great craftsmanship and visual dynamism, I don't know if it's possible at this point to do enough to differentiate the film's setting from other cyberpunk dystopias. If you're not into the concept at the primal generic level Alita could well look like just another of its kind to those for whom any one is enough. The film is also indisputably repetitive, presumably covering multiple episodes of the original Japanese strip. We get multiple go-rounds on the Motorball track -- the sport of the future is basically Rollerball on cyber-roids -- and multiple fights with an evil but relatively dull cyborg who's really no more than a tertiary villain in a hierarchy where the top is mostly unseen. We can question the pacing of the film, again arguably a consequence of biting off more of the original than it could chew. The cyborg heroine (Rosa Salazar) has a boyfriend (Keean Johnson) caught in an inescapable mortal predicament resolved by Alita decapitating him but diverting some of her own bloodstream into his brain so the head can be installed on a cyborg body. This looks like the setup for a happy ending of cyborg love, but just a few minutes later the boyfriend is off on a suicide mission and this time Alita can't save him. It makes you question the point of saving him the first time around. Meanwhile, while Cameron, Rodriguez and co-writer Laeta Kalogridis may have bitten off more than they could chew of the complete manga, the film isn't actually complete. While there's no cliffhanger, it does leave things open-ended with a promise of future battles between Alita and the nebulous big-bad (Edward Norton) if she finally acts on her centuries-old directive to destroy the villain's elitist floating city. I can imagine some people groaning at the promise of a sequel that I suspect will never happen, based on the sparse crowd I saw the movie with. But as far as I'm concerned the scene of Alita, now a champion-level Motorballer, raising her sword in apparent salute to the spectators but also in an implicit threat to the floating city, makes for an awesome ending.

Beyond that, despite her initially creepily cartoonish computerized face Salazar as Alita won me over with her fairy-tale Frankensteinian (or Pinocchian) good-little-death-machine personality, while Christoph Waltz, an on-and-off character actor, was quite charming as her surrogate father, a techno-nerd variation on his benign bounty hunter from Django Unchained. Jennifer Connelly was fine in a semi-villainous role and ultimately tragic role as Waltz's ex-wife, while Mahershala Ali often seemed to sleepwalk through a literally superficial secondary-villain role that required him often to play his own puppetmaster. All this aside, the real star of the film is Robert Rodriguez, one the great genre minds of our time, who somehow manages to foreground personality amid the massive production design while staging several amazing action scenes. If the overall film feels repetitive at times, Rodriguez knows when and how to escalate the action. You can see this in the difference between the scene where Alita is only an eager spectator for Motorball and the big tryout game where she's in the middle of the action, literally the target for all the other competitors. You can also see it in the way Alita makes relatively short work of her most frequent antagonist in their final encounter; by then, there's no need for them to have another long battle. Alita is a film that feels longer than it actually is -- just over two hours -- but it's a good kind of long, the kind that immerses you in a densely detailed and constantly strange cityscape and keeps your eye constantly engaged. It's a film that gets a lot done, and it left me, at least, sort of hoping that that sequel does get me. I'm just the sort of dope that likes this stuff.