[We Disagree] Alita: Battle Angel

2018, d. Robert Rodriguez - Crave

Remember the first trailer for Alita: Battle Angel?  The one where Alita's eyes are so huge they're legitimately upsetting...the kind of unnatural visual that gets the villagers rallying with their torches and storming the castle ready to kill the beasts.  In case you forgot:




Looking into those huge CGEyes, the trailer is a horrifying and unsettling journey beyond the uncanny valley.  But once you actually start watching the you can possibly look past the eyes and instead be tangibly upset with the tangibly unreality of Alita's entire computer animated face that is on screen throughout over 80% of the film.  You'll never ease into it's not-human nature...the way the mouth moves primarily, especially when it contorts into a pinched, fangy smile.  *Shudder*

In the year-ish since Alita's debut and unsuccessful domestic box office venture (though it did make considerable bank globally), the film has garnered a rather cult-like collection of supporters (*cough*Toast*cough*).  I won't ever deny anyone something they enjoy, but dear god this is a terrible, terrible movie.

I don't know the source material since I'm not an anime fan.  There's something structurally about most anime that I find grating, so I just avoid most of it (which isn't to say I dislike all Japanese animation, like Studio Ghibli and non-genre anime tend to be ok, but I just can't summon the energy to wade through it all to find the ones I could tolerate).  What bothers me about this westernized "live action" re-envisioning of the anime isn't the aspects that feel anime.  No, it's the godawful dialogue, character dynamics, story progression and, grrr, futuresport.  I hate futuresports.


The relationships between the characters only exist in cliche.  There's not a single dynamic here that feels unique, and every  one of those relationships progress in the film in completely predictable fashion.  Like memory-less Alita, the waif-ish ingenue, immediately falls in love with Hugo, and accepts Dr. Dyson as her father figure, and makes "the big speech" to try to rally the antagonistic hunter-warriors to her aide against the bad guys.

As a result, the dialogue in this film is clunky as hell.  The characters only ever speak like they're reading lines in preparation for a series of very bad plays.  I can't think of a single moment where it felt like two characters shared anything real between them.  All dialogue here seems to have intent, whether it's overt exposition or pensive pondering or brutal, Hallmark-ian romantic exchanges. 

The film's visuals are very unique, and the world is rather distinct (it's a far future society that has all but collapsed, where there exists only one remaining city, "Iron City", surrounded by trash, and above it a hovering golden city Zalem, the dream of every lowly person to achieve status to go up there.  But rather than this acting as any sort of tangible class metaphor, the story ignores it for a cliched adventure about a cyborg girl and her missing memories and a lot of stupid futuresport.

The source material was originally serialized manga, and even the original anime was multi-part.  The film reflects this with it's many, many, too many plot threads, like the murder mystery plot, or Hugo's dreams of being a Motorball star and going to Zalem, or Alita's missing memories, or Dr. Dyson's tension with his estranged ex wife over the use of their dead daughter's body (and name) for this amnesiac cyborg... the "hunter warriors" league, the influence of Nova from high up above, the curious case of the missing limbs, etc etc.  This film has so much going on, and almost all of it is exhaustingly cliche.
 The reality of Alita revolves around its futuresport, called "Motorball".  The biggest champion of Motorball has the potential to elevate to Zalem, so everyone is obsessed with it.  People body mod with cybernetics to give them an advantage in Motorball, and it's an "anything goes" sport.  It's people wearing rollerblades with rockets on them racing after a ball in a circular track, trying to slam the ball into a repository.  It's just cyborg Rollerball.  God I hate futuresports.  Films can get too mired in explaining futuresports rules, or they can forget to really explain the futuresport and just let it happen, and in either case it's annoying...does anyone *really* care about the result of any futuresports game ever?  It's never playing out in real-time so the drama of a sports match can never capture the feeling of watch a real sport, so what's the point?  (Yes, Quiddich is a futuresport and I hate the amount of space it takes up in those books and movies too).

Most of Robert Rodriguez's films are enjoyable, even if they're not great films .  There's a consistent style shared among most of his films from the Desperado trilogy through to the various grindhouse-inspired work and his kids movies.  The outsiders are Sin City and Predators, where the director is working on an established property that isn't his own and seems to create a tighter, more careful production.  This is definitely in that outsider territory, to the point that I didn't remember he was the director until the end credits.

Likewise I forgot that James Cameron was involved with this.  It was seeing Cameron's script credit (with Laeta Kalogridis) that it all made sense.  Cameron trades almost exclusively in big showy productions filled with boring stock characters who never remotely feel or act like real people.  I can accept those types of characters in a cheap, intentionally stupid Hallmark movie, but in a film costing over a hundred million dollars, I want characters that believe their reality.   

I hated this movie.