Alita: Battle Angel Review
“He wasn’t a dog lover, I don’t like that.”
Alita is a thoroughly enjoyable movie from start to finish. Director Robert Rodriguez delivers a film that has a lot of fun, violent action scenes and a lot more nuanced moments than we have come to expect from a blockbuster movie. The camerawork is top notch, which I was surprised by until the credits rolled and I saw that it was Bill Pope begins the camera and it made a lot more sense. The camera was often placed in strange positions, but would pan into a place we are more used to seeing and it felt very unique and refreshing.
Alita’s character also felt refreshing and new. Even though we have all seen the robot that doesn’t remember their past story a million times, the character design and Rosa Salazar’s performance added a lot to the traditional narrative. The CGI in this movie knocked my socks off back to no-rule Tuesday. Alita looks real the entire time, normally when you get real close to a CG character, you notice the imperfections in technology, but here they pull up close to her enormous eyes and you believe this kind of cyborg actually exists and you just haven’t met one yet. Rosa Salazar plays the titular innocent, naive, and complete bad-ass character to perfection. So much of this movie rests on her shoulders to juggle all the emotions that are fluttering around inside a blank head, and she delivers like Domino’s Pizza.
The other performances are great, save for the guy that plays the love interest, Hugo. It’s like someone told him that he’s in a Lifetime movie, and he just always looks and acts out of place and the entire plot that revolves around him just suffers because of it. It’s like when you have a group project for school and you split up the work, and one guy shows up the day it’s due and just completely ignored what the rest of the team did. Based on the small amount of research I’ve done, it sounds like it’s actually better in the movie than it was in the Manga, so I guess that’s a positive.
The world was masterfully crafted. It, again, just feels real and I just haven’t seen it yet. It goes to show that if you spend $170 Million on a movie, you can actually make it look stunning. The action sequences are just the icing on the cake. Alita is the most violent PG-13 movie I’ve ever seen, right up there alongside The Dark Knight. Just watching the precision take downs of these cyborgs just absolutely murdering each other. I guess when they aren’t people, even if they have the faces of real people, you can just murder than in the most gruesome ways possible as long as there is minimal blood. The action sequence in the Motorball arena in particular was incredible to watch, unlike anything I’ve seen in recent memory. The fluid motion and fighting on the track got your heart racing line you were down there skating alongside these robots that are just bullying each other like 6th graders stealing a 2nd graders lunch money. It also just reminded me of speed skating, which is one of my favorite Winter Olympic sports, so I was enthralled by the entire setpiece.
Overall, a lot to love about this movie. I don’t think it’s gunna be anyone’s favorite movie, but I think it is inventive and unique enough that it warrants a viewing on the big IMAX screen for the expanded screen in key sequences.
Final Score: 7.0/10