Film Review - Alita: Battle Angel (12A)

I'm not your daughter. I don't know who I am.

Let me plead ignorance from the get-go - I don't do manga. But then I don't read Marvel comics either, yet I feel perfectly comfortable reviewing MCU movies (click here, here or indeed here for my thoughts on last year's crop). See, sometimes an outside perspective can be helpful. Alita: Battle Angel is perhaps the first live-action adaptation from Japanese graphic novel source-material to have enthused manga fans, succeeding where films like Ghost in the Shell let them down. But does it work for members of the wider audience? Well more than this outsider was expecting.

Based on Yukita Kishiro's ongoing comic-book saga, Alita is set in the dystopian 26th century Iron City, a melting-pot that has survived an apocalyptic event referred to as The Fall. On a vast scrapheap kindly Dr Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) retrieves the disembodied head of a female cyborg (part human, part machine, if you don't do science-fiction at all). He reconstructs the girl, who he names Alita, bringing her back to life. 

But while his new surrogate daughter has a functioning human brain (and great mesmerizing manga eyes), she has virtually no memory of her past - aside, that is, from the flashes that come back to her when she fights. And boy this girl can fight. Armed with expertise in a deadly martial art named Panzer Kunst, Alita joins her new human dad in his night-time job as a bounty-hunter (hunter-warrior in the Iron City vernacular). But the forces that rule Iron City are soon taking a dark interest in this formidable teenage-seeming war machine.

That's the gist, but there's a whole lot more, believe me. The first hour of Alita's bonding with her engineer-father, her search for a sense of identity and her embracing of a brutal arena sport called Motorball - that's all fun and involving. But much additional story is simultaneously crammed in, including threads that simply can't be resolved in a single movie. (Franchise calling!) These exposition-chunks serve to distract from the central character dramas and create confusion over the nature of the true villain. There are so many plot elements to follow that the later stages become overly frantic and unfocused, both Jennifer Connolly and Green Book's excellent Mahershala Ali getting short-changed as a result. Oh and some of James Cameron's dialogue (ever a bit clunky) steps too far over the soppy-line.

All that's a shame, for elsewhere Alita really succeeds. The Dystopia - inevitably influenced by a dozen others - is a spectacular brand of grimy, while the performance capture of Alita and her fellow cyborgs is integrated seamlessly into the live action. Director Robert Rodriguez provides the action with grace and flow (backed up by first-rate cinematographer Bill Pope), and the crazy Murderball sequences benefit in particular. As for the acting, Rosa Salazar proves a sympathetic lead as Alita, her performance rendered impressively by the effects process. Waltz is in ultra-likeable Django Unchained mode, while Londoner Ed Skrein is a hissable lower-order villain - hunter-warrior Zapan. 

Credit to writer-producer Cameron (and I'm not always first in line to praise the Titanic-meister) for risking a brand-new cinema property rather than rehashing something old. And added props to him and Rodriquez for impressing manga fans with the result. For as long as Alita was working as a standalone story I felt a thrill of excitement, one which started to fade once the movie took on that groundwork-laying quality. You know, plot-cramming to set up future films, rather than keeping things tight in the immediate story. I enjoyed the movie much more than I'd anticipated, but I wish it had kept a tighter rein on the tale being told.

Gut Reaction: First half - genuine thrills. Second half - not lacking entertainment, but if I'd been wearing a watch, I'd have checked it.  

Memorable Moment: Going to need a new body then...

Ed's Verdict: 7/10. A technical triumph, if not a storytelling one. There's much to enjoy in Alita, not least its central character and her various cyborg showdowns. For this non-manga fan, it fell the right side of okay.