“The future isn’t what it used to be.” When French philosopher Paul Valéry wrote that in 1937, he wasn’t bemoaning a lack of imagination in bloated dystopian tentpoles. He was expressing the pessimism prevalent among European intellectuals following World War I. The more things change, though, the more they stay the same. His words might have been just as pithy a response to a viewing of Alita: Battle Angel. The experience could leave the most ardent film fan pessimistic about the state of Hollywood entertainment.
Like WWI, this film was a dreadful idea. Also like that humanitarian horror, the latest from formerly fun director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) is violent, noisy, hokey, derivative and devoid of meaning. Cowritten by the filmmaker with James Cameron (Avatar) and Laeta Kalogridis (Terminator Genisys) and based on the manga series by Yukito Kishiro, the movie is little more than a $200 million mashup of tropes from previous bloated dystopian tentpoles.
From the start, Alita‘s appetite for appropriation is on shameless display. The first thing we see is a sky city whose designers managed to rip off three — count ’em, three — better films simultaneously. Zalem, where the 1 percent live in 2563, hovers above the squalid, overcrowded Iron City, home to the rest of the human race along with a population of robots.
It’s impossible to miss the similarity between Zalem — poised above the bustling, crumbling dump that’s become the meme for postapocalyptic civilization — and the mammoth alien ship poised above the bustling, crumbling District 9. Or the fact that the bloated dystopian tentpole Elysium built that same city in 2013. Not content to steal from two futuristic effects fests in the first five minutes, Alita‘s creators also lift the trademark H.R. Giger aesthetic from the Alien franchise, applying it liberally to the floating paradise. Like people automatically want to live in a place that looks like the Nostromo just because it’s the future.
That opening also introduces us to Christoph Waltz rummaging through a mountain of junk. He plays Dr. Dyson Ido, a scientist who specializes in repurposing robot parts. When he finds the head and partial torso of a female cyborg, he naturally carries them back to his lab and attaches them to the android body he constructed for his late daughter.
The next morning, Alita wakes to find herself with gleaming new arms and legs but no memory of her old life. I should probably add that she’s a cartoon, a digital creation that looks like she was ejected from one of the Keane paintings in Big Eyes. Rosa Salazar provides the basis for the character. Performance-capture technology and CGIs do the rest.
Appallingly dumb, unimaginative developments and dialogue ensue for two interminable hours. Alita, for example, falls for a human boy (Keean Johnson), learns to play motorball (Rollerball with Transformers-style robots), discovers she’s trained in martial arts, rumbles with bad-guy bots and gets an upgrade to a new body with bigger bionic breasts. I’m not making that up. Or that the boy then enthuses, “You’re the most human person I’ve ever met.”
So, if you’re looking for comic-book-quality characters, mindless mayhem and postapocalyptic visuals you looked at already in Blade Runner, Dark City, The Fifth Element, The Matrix, Jupiter Ascending, Ready Player One and Mortal Engines, I really can’t recommend Alita: Battle Angel highly enough. If, however, you’re looking for anything infinitesimally more interesting, this isn’t a film you want in your future.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Alita: Battle Angel”
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This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2019.
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“It’s impossible to miss the similarity between Zalem poised above the bustling, crumbling dump that’s become the meme for postapocalyptic civilization and the mammoth alien ship poised above the bustling, crumbling District 9. Or the fact that the bloated dystopian tentpole Elysium built that same city in 2013.” This proves you did little research before seeing this movie. Alita is based off of a Manga that ran from 1990 to 1995, and basically everything you see here was in it, with some minor changes. If anything those movies, which I do enjoy, took inspiration from the Manga, not the other way around. I have seen this criticism a lot in the negative reviews, and it is frustrating. The problem Alita has is that everyone has already raided it for ideas over the past three decades, so when it finally hit theaters, people bash it for not being original. In fact, this was a foundation work for the Cyber Punk genera, and has been a heavy influence in a lot of other works. If you are going to critique it for originality, at least point to works that came out before 1990, not something that came out more recently, that clearly has been influenced by the original Manga. To be fair, you did point out Blade Runner, but everything else was release after the original Manga series ended.
From the start, this critic’s appetite for cluelessness is on shameless display. The first criticism we see shows the lack of research done for this review.
That’s you, that’s how you sound.
Seriously, you couldn’t even bother to check the year Kishiro’s work was published before foaming about who ripped off who and risk looking foolish by being wrong?
The rest of the review just keeps showing off how much of a sour and superficial pov you had while watching the movie.
Truly shameless.
I can’t believe your review. I’m not a critic but I’m 48 years and I have seen a lot of movies in my life. I am also a reader of the manga since its first release. I can seriously affirm that this movie is a masterpiece. I’ve seen it twice (I do not remember another movie that I have watched twice in a cinema). The best film I have ever seen and the best adaptation in a movie of a manga masterpiece. So I still can’t believe of your review but the word is nice also because of the diversity of people.
One star? Are you serious? This is a joke. I’m not sure how writers like you made it as far as they did, but the fact is you all just really screwed up. Alita supported 15,000 jobs, dude! Hundreds of thousands of working hours, visual dreams, and dedication. And despite a 95% audience approval rating people aren’t seeing it because of critics like you, meaning there likely won’t be a sequel, meaning 15,000 fewer job opportunities in the film industry and countless more crushed hopes from an audience that didn’t listen to the haters and instead saw Alita for what it is- A pure masterpiece.
It is quite clear that you did no research, you have no idea the work it took Rosa and the film production to bring Alita to life, and for some reason you think its okay for you as a grown man to shame a young woman’s breast in a coming of age story. I can’t even take you seriously as a writer… all I want to know is why in the world does this tasteless and poorly written review deserve to show up in my search results?
“It’s impossible to miss the similarity between Zalem poised above the bustling, crumbling dump that’s become the meme for postapocalyptic civilization and the mammoth alien ship poised above the bustling, crumbling District 9.”
The work that was responsible for this movie predates District 9 by 19 years, the original run of Battle Angel aka Gunm released in 1990 in written format and received an animated film in 1993. To claim that this is ripping off material that came after it just shows how utterly uninformed you are in writing this article. This is an adaptation of previous work, and in that respects it is an incredibly faithful one. All of the visuals and major scenes are straight out of what came before, it adheres to its source material strictly and encapsulates it well.
It would be a true shame if you familiarized yourself with what you were reviewing before you reviewed it. Perhaps a little bit of research would leave you looking less foolish.
“When Dr Ido finds the head and partial torso of a female cyborg, he naturally carries them back to his lab and attaches them to an android body” So funny. When I saw the two hundred million dollar figure, I actually felt a pain in my heart. Thinking of the 40 amazing movies that could have made instead. This movie has the sophistication and thoughtfulness of a Flintstones episode.
Movie was great, some critics are sometimes soooooo dumb!
Now you did it Rick , you pissed off the comic book nerds !