Alita: Battle Angel
While I don’t want to pigeonhole him into another mega-budget franchise, there are action sequences during “Alita: Battle Angel” that make me hope that Paramount would back the truck up for Robert Rodriguez to direct future “Transformers” installments, if they are insistent on continuing with the robot chaos franchise that Michael Bay built, and this holiday’s “Bumblebee” somewhat redeemed. If that were not to happen, though, I’ll gladly wait for whenever Rodriguez, James Cameron and Disney feel like greenlighting a sequel, because I want more of Rodriguez directing big films.
Just on first viewing alone, this may be my favorite Robert Rodriguez film. Yes, his smaller action films are fast, loose and exciting, “Spy Kids” was a great original, and “Sin City” was wonderful new noir, but there’s an energy and looseness to the way Rodriguez directs “Alita,” a manga adaptation that was long a pet project of Cameron’s before “Avatar” took over his career, that feels unlike anything he has ever done, even though he is not shooting or cutting the film himself like he had up to this point. By ceding some control, his direction feels more confident and controlled, and I enjoyed every minute of what he put on film here.
This film begins with Dr. Dyson Ido (Christophe Waltz) searching through a junkyard in Iron City from the city above, Zalem. He finds a female cyborg head with a fully intact brain that he will be able to attach to a cyborg body (he is a cybernetic doctor who specializes in working on cyborgs), and Alita (Rosa Salazar) is born. Because her brain is intact, though, she is aware that she has another name, but she is not quite sure what it is. She has been inactive for a while, but flashes come back as the world cyborgs inhabit comes racing into Alita’s life.
From what little I have seen from his TV series, “Dark Angel,” I can see why this world so interested James Cameron, so that he was developing this at the same time as “Avatar” before finally handing it off to Rodriguez to direct at his Troublemaker Studios in Austin. These two visual masters have built a stunning world along with the team at WETA for a society in 2563 that is three centuries removed from war, but still stinging from the aftermath of it. Yes, you’ve seen a lot of the elements before- in “The Matrix,” in “Dark City,” in Cameron’s “Terminator” films, in anime like “Ghost in the Shell” and “Akira”- but we are sucked into the film visually regardless, and it’s because, for as familiar as it seems, there’s much about the world of “Alita” that is fresh in how it takes those concepts and molds them. I really wish I had taken the chance to watch this in 3D, because there are images that must have been mindblowing to see, and both Rodriguez and Cameron have been two of the better users of digital 3D in the past decade-plus.
The screenplay is by Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, whom has done films as diverse as “Night Watch,” “Terminator Genisys” and “Shutter Island,” but has also done uncredited work for Cameron over the years. This is probably the strongest piece of writing I’ve seen credited, at least partially, to Cameron in a good long while, and I think Kalogridis is a big part of that, with Alita in particular being an engaging lead surrounded by weird, but interesting, supporting characters played by Waltz, Jennifer Connolly, Mahershala Ali, Keean Johnson (as a scavenger named Hugo), among others. Salazar is the visual model for Alita, but it’s ultimately a performance-capture performance, and may be one of the best in recent memories, and yes, you can discuss how her visual design includes the “anime eyes” that look really bizarre in live-action realism, but after a while, you don’t notice it, and Salazar’s performance is so interesting to watch that you don’t care.
I was not quite sure what to make of the film when the trailers began to land, but I certainly was not ready to bury it, especially with Cameron and Rodriguez behind it. “Alita: Battle Angel” may be one of the movies I come out of 2019 being most excited by, and that’s a fun prospect. For both filmmakers, it’s a clear labor of love, as well as a smashing action film with smart, compelling sci-fi ideas I hope to see them flesh out more in the future.
