"Alita: Battle Angel” Review
Alita is a film that's been in development for over 20 years. Based on Yukito Kishiro's Gunnm manga, it's a story about a cyborg girl finding out who she is and taking down an evil generic villain or whatever. It's too bad this movie isn't very good at even telling a simple story such as that.
Badass female protagonist, slick production design, great sound design, and groundbreaking visual effects aside, this movie is a failure from a script level. To boil it down to its fundamentals, Alita is 70% wonky exposition, 30% kickass action sequences, and 0% heart. I do kind of enjoy the movie a bit from a superficial level with my favourite scene being one where Alita discovers chocolate for the first time (all in glorious IMAX 3D!). But this reminded me of the scene in two of the Wonder Woman adaptations where Wonder Woman discovers ice cream for the first time. Oh, how I wish I was watching Wonder Woman instead. The environments seem reminiscent of 1995's Ghost in the Shell, a film with great world building and well-handled exposition, and enlightening philosophical introspection. There's also a hint of Blade Runner in there (a franchise with arguably some of the best world building in fiction) and it was during this realization that I thought "wow, this movie is a paradox." It's a movie that can only be realized in the present day due to how far vfx have come but the story itself seems half a century too late to be as revolutionary as the technology that was used to bring the movie to life. It takes and borrows so much from other stories and the movie ends up feeling lost in its identity as something that was clearly created in the past but put in this weird new shiny shell (just like Alita herself but minus the weird fetishistic implications of what her bodies mean in the context of the film to her father figure and to her boring boyfriend).
There are other cyberpunk stories out there that has way more interesting and coherent things to say about humanity. And, as stylish as the action sequences are, there are action movies out there that uses action to tell their story opposed to just being used for the spectacle. For a film that pushes visual effects so far, it never pushes the idea of visual storytelling. There's no other way to say this but Alita: Battle Angel is a massive disappointment and feels really boring despite its amazing visuals.