Alita: Battle Angel **** (2019, Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Keean Johnson, Mahershala Ali, Eiza González) – Movie Review

As brought to us by the brilliantly creative minds at Weta Digital, a digital performance capture version of Rosa Salazar stars as the cybernetic character Alita in director Robert Rodriguez’s thoroughly entertaining romantic sci-fi action, adventure, Alita: Battle Angel. It is eye-popping and vibrantly dynamic throughout, but two or three times the action goes into exhilarating eyeball-melting overdrive.

The technology is breathtaking, the movie looks stunning on the IMAX 3D big screen, it imaginatively creates a dystopian future world of of its own, and is super laden with both ideas, character and dialogue as well as action packed. So there are loads and loads to admire.

However, Alita: Battle Angel just fails to be a total triumph, slightly stalling occasionally, and feeling derivative sometimes, so overall it is very good but not quite great, exciting but not thrilling. On the derivative front, it recalls Ghost in the Shell (2017) and Rollerball (1975) so much that you want to see them again immediately.

It is hard to judge Salazar’s role as a performance, but she is very effective. Oscar winning scene-stealer Christoph Waltz is a good choice as Dr Dyson Ido, who finds Alita in a dump when looking for cyborg parts. He reanimates her but she shocks him by becoming a lethal, dangerous being, but with a soft spot for a boy, Hugo (Keean Johnson), whom she promptly falls for. She remembers nothing, but her purpose seems clear – to fight and kill the bad guys. And there are plenty of them, as usual.

Among them are Vector played by Mahershala Ali, possibly Chiren played by Jennifer Connelly, maybe the cyborg spare parts scavenger played by Jorge Lendeborg Jr and certainly Zapan played by Ed Skrein. Ali and Connelly are more sinister presences in the film, just being there rather than offering acting performances, but unfortunately Skrein tries to act, or rather over-act as the London villain. He is quite shockingly bad, and not really in a fun way either, casting a shadow on the film. It is not the only weak performance in the film but it is the worst.

But then it is hardly about performances at all, just cyphers and cyborgs, pawns in a grand game shifted around the board by Robert Rodriguez, who directs like a man who can hardly believe his luck when Cameron offered him the helming job so he could concentrate of his Avatar sequels.

Even if you didn’t know anything about it, you would easily intuit that the screenplay is based on a graphic novel series, in this case Gunnm by Yukito Kishiro. That has given James Cameron, Robert Rodriguez and Laeta Kalogridis plenty to build on for their screenplay. They have created a strong movie edifice that should be good for a trilogy at least.

Incidentally what is good is that the trailers have not spoiled Alita all, but on the other hand they have under-sold it. It is a far better movie than any of the trailers have suggested.

It opens in the UK on 6 February 2019 but not till 14 February 2019 in the US.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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