‘Alita: Battle Angel’ Movie Review

By: Courtney Thatcher

Action and Sci-Fi film “Alita: Battle Angel” brings the Japanese manga series “Gunnm” to life on the big screen.

According to Metacritic, the film takes place “several centuries in the future [where] the abandoned Alita (Rosa Salazar) is found in the scrapyard of Iron City by [Daisuke] Ido (Christoph Waltz).”

Ido is a “compassionate cyber-doctor who takes the unconscious cyborg Alita to his clinic. When Alita awakens, she has no memory of who she is, nor any recognition of the world she finds herself in… As [Alita] learns to navigate her new life and the treacherous streets of Iron City, Ido tries to shield her from her mysterious past,” according to Metacritic.

Richard Newby from The Hollywood Reporter stated, “the film follows amnesiac teenage cyborg Alita as she discovers love, loss and the facets of her identity within the complex backdrop of the impoverished Iron City and the floating city of Zalem above.

Newby also stated that the film took nearly 20 years to produce. Originally made as a Japanese cyberpunk manga by Yukito Kishiro, director James Cameron decided to take on the project back in 2015. While working on other films such as a sequel to Avatar (2009), Cameron got the help of Laeta Kalogridis and Robert Rodriguez to bring Alita to life. The cybernetic world shows creativity and style from both Cameron and Rodriguez who shared similar interests in the project.

The film “Alita: Battle Angel” received high ratings from critics on Metacritic, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes as well as ranked highly in the Top Box Office with a gross of $7.3 million. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film scored a 60 percent on the ‘Tomatometer’ and an ‘Audience Score’ of 94 percent. On Metacritic the thriller made a ‘Metascore’ of 54 out of 100, followed by a 7.6 out of a 10-star rating on IMDb.

Though the film seems to have done fine in the ratings, most of the sites ‘Top Critics’ had some negative remarks to make in their reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, one critic, Peter Travers from Rolling Stone, left a review saying, “Screenwriter James Cameron and director Robert Rodriquez’s [sic] long-in-the-making adaptation of a popular manga feels wobbly, worked-over and way past its sell-by date. It looks ready to rock, but there’s no life left in the party.”

On Metacritic, Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, left a ‘Metascore’ of 60 and commented, “Alita: Battle Angel is a film with Imax spectacle and big effects. But for all its scale, it might end up being put on for 13-year-olds as a sleepover entertainment. It doesn’t have the grownup, challenging, complicated ideas of Ghost in the Shell. A vanilla dystopian romance.”

When watching the film, I found it easy to fall into the world and caught up quickly to the rules of the realm. The story is well described and detailed enough for anyone who hasn’t read the manga or seen the anime (like myself) to follow along. The AI technology was incredible and made all the animated characters look organic and real to the world in which they lived. Though the story had a good plot and was easy to get lost in, there were moments of confusion where the story line seemed to get muddled by the romance built within. It’s not uncommon to see an action movie with romance in it, but this seemed to take the main purpose of the film and overshadow it with the teenage heart-throb and mystic cyborg getting together.

The lack of main plot wasn’t the only thing that seemed to go wrong. Calling this film an action film is almost incorrect. There is action, yes, but the action starts to happen more than halfway through the two-hour long film. The whole beginning is spent setting up the world and describing rather than jumping into the action. Also, after finally getting into the action, the film starts to conclude and the whole movie seems to be lacking, so we’re left with a bunch of unanswered questions. The end obviously leaves it open for a sequel, but when it took four years to create the first film, are we guaranteed a second one? If so, will it follow the same romance first, plot second, or is the audience going to get the wicked action movie the trailers made it out to be?

If rated, I would give this film a 6.5 out of 10 for plot and structure, an 8 out of 10 for creativity and realness, and a 4.5 out of 10 for expectation versus reality. I still highly recommend the movie and most definitely would watch it a second time, but I would not go in with the same expectation I had the first time I saw it.

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