Alita: Battle Angel

Many modern blockbusters have a plot problem, and Alita has a bad dose of it. There's stuff to like in here, but the relentless forward momentum kills it dead far too often.

The inescapable problem here is there's so much ground to cover that there's barely a chance to breathe. This causes problems ranging from the reasonably trivial - how does motorball actually work?! - to major ones that drag everything else down. The biggest IMO is a lack of breathing space or even basic sense of atmosphere: the film has so much plot and lore ground to cover, details are rarely allowed simmer or develop. There's no opportunity for a real sense of place to develop, for example, or for characters to move beyond being merely functional. The mish-mash plot takes a long time to decide what the actual stakes are, and has like five main villains. That the script is noticeably not very good for decent chunks of time doesn't help (some of the romantic scenes are fairly hopeless), and the blatant sequel-teasing means this all feels rather frustratingly unresolved. It's a strange problem: it simultaneously has too much plot as well as not enough. They clearly didn't know whether this would be a franchise starter, and hedged their bets awkwardly.

Then there's the pedestrian direction. While the action packs more of a brutal punch than I was expecting, that's where the strength ends. For all the CG wonder on display, Rodriquez leaves little room for good ol' Hollywood awe or rarely lets impressive shots or scene last those extra few moments necessary to really sell them. Everything is constantly pushing forward, and basic plot mechanics and lore feel like they dominate over the really meaty stuff. It means key scenes play out in bog standard shot-reverse shot with nothing in the way of flair.

But there's bright spots. Mainly I think its major strength is the way it succeeds in translating grotesque cyborg designs into a CG-animation / live action hybrid. I'd go as far as saying some of the more outrageous, extravagant designs are some of the more imaginative to have graced Hollywood cinema recently. It's a better attempt at translating manga to live action than a few others I've seen for sure.

In the end, though, Alita: Battle Angel is simply too busy. It's almost as if there's two films - or, it would seem, two or three story arcs - crammed into one. It delivers moments of impressive, expensive spectacle, but it's a sugar rush: fun in the moment, but a bit of a downer in the long-term.