Alita: Battle Angel

2019, Robert Rodriguez (Machete) -- download

I have said it before but there is a certain type of genre movie that seems to be made for me. Think big, expansive worlds like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets or over the top scifi worlds like in Mortal Engines & Jupiter Ascending. I like big, cinematic and imaginative. That is one of the reasons I was always attracted to anime, for nothing gets its vast on like the melodrama in anime. The Japanese are not afraid to make their worlds too big, just like the eyes and just like the cries out loud. And the melodrama.

Alita: Battle Angel came originally as a Manga and then as a popular 90s anime movie. Rodriguez comes along, after James Cameron gives up to focus on his blue elves, with a grand film that is faithful in many ways my memory says it was. It's been years since I either read the comic or saw the movie, but the world, the characters and the sheer audacity of its far future human cyborg relations is faithful.

In case you haven't guessed, I rather liked it, and I will have to either see it (if possible) in the cinema or at least get a blu-ray, as my wont of downloading decent rips doesn't always translate well with movies as CGI illuminated as this one, with digital breakup taking over many scenes.

In this world Zalem, the last remaining floating city (the rest taken down by war hundreds of years prior), hangs above Iron City. The rich are above, the poor are below but everyone is mixed up in trans-humanity, some going so far as to only have their brains remain, the rest of their bodies converted into fantastic creatures, many so far as to become monsters. Ido (Christoph Waltz), the local free-clinic doctor, finds the upper torso of Alita in the trash (all that falls from Zalem can have a new life in Iron City) and reconstructs her, including the lower body of his lost daughter. Her memory is absent so he tries to instill in her a wonder for Iron City while ignoring the fact she has a legendary warrior buried somewhere inside her.

Migawd this movie looked lovely! Iron City is just lovingly created, drawing upon the source material but also using imagery that made me think of Mexico City. Of course, the parallels of the current US / Mexico situation, with the glorious, rich city in The Sky (behind The Wall) compared to people who are just doing their best to gain enough prestige to move there. That's not to say Iron City isn't a lovely place to live, as despite the obvious separation of lifestyles, you can still be happy & healthy in Iron City. As long as the monsters don't get you.

While the overall plot of a young girl finding herself and her empowered place in the world doesn't entirely work, the classic anime of What Is Human does. I always translated that to What Is Sentient, because who are we to decide what gets to be A Person? Humanity is likely not the only intelligent life in the universe, so its not so much as whether you are Human or not, as whether you are a living creature of intelligent & emotion. Ghost in the Shell took that premise and decided that the presence of a Ghost, a migrated otherness (soul?) that was housed in an entirely artificial shell, was enough to be Human. They don't go as far here, for as long as there is a brain that generates humanity, the metal people of Iron City are human. Or so the story wants us to believe. Meanwhile, we question the humanity of the man who while entirely biological, seems to act as the shell for another man.

This one will definitely bear another watching or two, and likely join The Shelf. That said, I am thinking its maybe the time to get a proper 4K blu-ray player.