*** outta *****

3 outta 5

After gestating in pre-production for decades, producer James Cameron handed off his adaptation of the anime Battle Angel: Alita to Robert Rodriguez mainly because Cameron is too busy making four more sequels to Avatar (no, really!). Rodriguez’s film career mostly bounces between some family friendly Spy Kids movies or Grindhouse gore and Alita lands somewhere in the middle. The cyborgs are often dismembered and dispatched in messy ways but since they’re cyborgs it isn’t R-rated. Alita looks fantastic and the action is very cool. Although there is so much here that it’s overstuffed with detail and nattering about sci-fi worldbuilding. So many things happen it has basically three or four endings, dozens of plot threads, and not a lot of resolution. It’s a bit of a mess but it’s a gloriously ambitious mess.

In a dystopian future, doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) finds the remnants of an ancient cyborg in the trash. She has a human brain so he gives her a body and names her Alita (Rosa Salazar). They live on the destroyed ruins of humanity where man and machine have combined. The wealthy Vector (Mahershala Ali) oversees all, running the brutal motorball sport that allows one person a year to rise to the heaven-like city above. Alita meets a guy named Hugo (Keenan Johnson) who shows her the ropes. But Alita is slowly recovering memories of her past life as a warrior hundreds of years ago and the more she explores the world, the more dangerous she becomes to the rulers above.

People talk in this movie. A lot. Basically, if they aren’t jawing the rules and backstory Alita and Hugo are falling in love. The romance plot is filler however there is one fantastic scene where Alita literally takes out her heart and offers it to Hugo. It’s a really sweet, very sci-fi twist on a romantic scene and has a great capper where Alita goes “Phew, that was intense!” Probably the best character moment is when Alita punches a cyborg in the face and he goes “You broke my nose!” and she says matter of factly “Yes, I did,” perfectly delivered by Salazar. She’s great as Alita and her big anime influenced eyed look makes her more empathetic and she has a full character journey from oblivious new life form to fully formed badass.  When she goes into fighting mode, it is shockingly quick like old muscle memory kicking in.

Waltz as the father figure/robot builder basically plays things very comforting. In the original anime, Ido’s first name is Daisuke but here it is Dyson which may or may not be a shout out to Miles Dyson the creator of Skynet from Cameron’s Terminator series. Maybe it is deliberate because later on a character gains a new robot body which looks suspiciously close to the T-800 Terminator exoskeleton.

There are more than a few bad guys competing for screen-time here which gets a little muddled. Jackie Earl-Haley’s Grewishka is a giant robot even though he’s just a grunt on the villainy roster. He even kills an adorably cute dog although it is a bit odd that mere seconds before Grewishka rather explicitly murders a guy on screen and nobody bats an eyelash but the plucky dog is when it’s too far. Ed Skrein as Zapan stalks around a lot talking about the robot bounty hunter code and while his design looks neat sometimes just looks obviously a human head floating on a CGI body. Jennifer Connelly plays a character with such nebulously ill-defined motives that it’s less mysterious and more just “Hey, look Jennifer Connelly is in it for a bit with a weird diamond on her forehead!”

Ali’s Vector mostly looks cool and says quite a lot of exposition but Ali is even still awesome at that. He is supposed to be the movie’s main antagonist but he’s undercut dramatically by having a boss. The great bad guy overlord living in the sky, Nova, is mostly revealed when he possesses people to deliver evil monologues to other characters. Ali’s Vector does it most of the time and Ali has some good freaky delivery and when Vector is released from Nova’s possession, Ali plays it like he’s physically ill. The actual Nova is fully revealed at the end played by a very well known actor which is a bit jarring and some blatant sequel bait.

Alita is consistently visually astounding definitely works as big screen 3D eye candy. Alita herself is built up and broken apart, at one point she is basically just a torso, a head and one arm yet still manages to fight back. The climatic motorball race sequence has lots of crazy robots smashing into each other featuring hard hitting action. The random flashbacks to Alita’s time as a warrior suggest a giant, apocalyptic war that is only shown from her intimate POV. Even with a dull, talky script, the movie is constantly throwing great FX and cool images throughout.

Alita: Battle Angel has probably way too much stuff crammed into a single movie to be coherent. But it is satisfying because the action delivers and main performance is very good. The future may be a jumble of sci-fi clichés but it still manages to look cool.