Alita: Battle Angel review

Director: Robert Rodriguez
Certificate: 12A
Running time: 122 minutes

Until halfway through I was thoroughly engrossed in this movie's characters, story and performances. The combination of the three was all drawing me into the world, but it got to a point where the story and character development hollowed out, resulting in a rather lacklustre ending that never really feels earned.

Set in the year 2563, three hundred years after 'The Fall', a war that ravaged the world, Dr Dyson (Christoph Waltz) discovers a cyborg body that has been dumped in the scrapyards of 'Iron City', from the more prosperous sky city of Zalem which sits above it. Dr Dyson takes the body back home, rebuilds it and names her Alita. It's not long before she falls in love, is introduced to the murky world of a violent sport called Motorball, and learns more about her warrior past.

If like me you've never read the manga the movie's based on, you'll still recognise the themes of futuristic dystopia and inequality that weave into its narrative and look. And to its credit the movie does look good without being visually overbearing. Its setting has a grim, physical presence that feels lived in rather than superficial.

There is a certain uncanny valley in the way Alita looks, but it never really distracted me, and a large part of this is the performance of Rosa Salazar, who really brings the character alive. Alita is naive and innocent, but ruthless when she has to be. While her transition from one to the other is not always convincing, I was always invested in her journey throughout.

The same cannot be said for the love story that becomes the central focus of the second half of the movie. It's believable at face value, but neither the script or the pacing ever give it enough weight to feel emotionally invested in.

The action scenes are imaginative and exciting enough to get some entertainment value, and to its credit the action always drives the plot forward, and they're edited in a way so that you know what's going on. Despite this, there's never any real tension or fear of danger when a character is so incredibly skilled and competent. There is another problem, outside of the Motorball scenes, the action is too precise and lacking in raw physicality to take you out of the fact that you're watching a high budget movie.

I enjoyed Alita for the most part, while the love story is too underdeveloped to care about, the ideas it tried to convey were fascinating, and it doesn't shove them down your throat. While the ending is anti-climatic, the last moments before the credits rolled were quite powerful to me. And I hope I get the chance to see this world again.

3/5