Alita: Battle Angel is a hero's journey of a fallen warrior cyborg who gains a second chance at life as a cyborg girl on earth.
Rosa Salazar does a wonderful job with the performance capture rig and catches and distills Alita's four basic emotions: wonder, delight, cold fury and totally berserk. Particularly the 'warpaint' scene shows her emoting both as a sad little girl and as a berserker going into pre-asskicking mode at the same time.
The world of Iron City is an interesting hybrid between the typical floating city/dystopian post apocalypse earth setting like Appleseed or Elysium and a Solarpunk, post-cyberpunk or hope punk mode almost like Wakanda with its street markets and sunny and colorful favelas.
Waltz does a reasonable job as Ido, but the other named characters are somewhat lacking. Mahershala Ali does his best with lines such as "Kill the girl called Alita." I suppose there might have been more worldbuilding and characterization that ended up cut to make the two hour runtime.
Alita is front and center, and her human emotions and vulnerabilities make her sympathetic and makes the cyborg-on-cyborg violence seem less jarring as we are all rooting for her to survive. The score, the staging, everything emphasizes that this is the story of Alita's fall and rise.
I'd like to see a series come out of this, the movie seems episodic anyway and doesn't have a very coherent plot, it's more like Vampire Hunter D and other manga in that way that its disjointed and not a lot of continuity some times.
I saw Alita at the local theater with no Dolby, IMAX whatever. But a nice small screening room so relative screensize was generous. Afternoon matinee had only a few people and there was no real audience reaction or interaction.
Overall, a good B movie and action cyberpunk smash'emup. Probably my favorite in the line of dystopian movies since Fury Road.
Alita is Better Than Expected
Alita: Battle Angel is a hero's journey of a fallen warrior cyborg who gains a second chance at life as a cyborg girl on earth.
Rosa Salazar does a wonderful job with the performance capture rig and catches and distills Alita's four basic emotions: wonder, delight, cold fury and totally berserk. Particularly the 'warpaint' scene shows her emoting both as a sad little girl and as a berserker going into pre-asskicking mode at the same time.
The world of Iron City is an interesting hybrid between the typical floating city/dystopian post apocalypse earth setting like Appleseed or Elysium and a Solarpunk, post-cyberpunk or hope punk mode almost like Wakanda with its street markets and sunny and colorful favelas.
Waltz does a reasonable job as Ido, but the other named characters are somewhat lacking. Mahershala Ali does his best with lines such as "Kill the girl called Alita." I suppose there might have been more worldbuilding and characterization that ended up cut to make the two hour runtime.
Alita is front and center, and her human emotions and vulnerabilities make her sympathetic and makes the cyborg-on-cyborg violence seem less jarring as we are all rooting for her to survive. The score, the staging, everything emphasizes that this is the story of Alita's fall and rise.
I'd like to see a series come out of this, the movie seems episodic anyway and doesn't have a very coherent plot, it's more like Vampire Hunter D and other manga in that way that its disjointed and not a lot of continuity some times.
I saw Alita at the local theater with no Dolby, IMAX whatever. But a nice small screening room so relative screensize was generous. Afternoon matinee had only a few people and there was no real audience reaction or interaction.
Overall, a good B movie and action cyberpunk smash'emup. Probably my favorite in the line of dystopian movies since Fury Road.