“Alita: Battle Angel” has grazed us in theater since 14 february. Alita is one of those movie, anime turned live action however unlike that movie who name must not be spoken *uhuk* dragonball evolution *uhuk* this movie is faithful to the source material. This movie is clearly a passion project by James Cameron the maker of Titanic and Avatar. Rumour says that Avatar is only created so that James have an engine to make “Alita: Battle Angel” real.
The movie’s story follows the early manga and has Dr. Ido, portrayed magnificently by Christoph Waltz, discover what he initially thinks is a ruined cyber body amongst the junk of the scrapyard of Iron City beneath the aerial city of Zalem.
In fact, the cyber body is still functioning and the brain is intact. Ido takes it back to his clinic and gives this mysterious young woman the cyborg body of his deceased daughter. In doing so, he also gives her the name of his daughter, Alita.
Alita initially has no real memory of her former life but it’s not long until she rediscovers her skills in the cyborg martial art of Panzer Kunst and gets the attention of the powers that be.
Along the way she meets her human love interest of Hugo and finds out more about her past, carefully expanded upon by Ido, and that she is the last in a line of incredibly advanced cyborg weapons from Mars.
All of this is delivered very convincingly and the various fights in the movie are not only very well done but also faithful to the manga too.
However, the choice to give Alita and her other Martian brethren abnormally massive eyes is quite hard to get used to. specially when compared to the rest of the cast, even the other cyborgs. That said, this is not the biggest problem the movie has. The dialogue is quite cringe at times and the relationship between Alita and Hugo is a little bit forced in my opinion.
“Alita: Battle Angel” is the latest big budget, young adult sci-fi films to not do well critically or commercially. Despite the fans liking it this movie only gross $280 million from $170 million budget. I felt like “Alita: Battle Angel” tried too hard to recreate the success of “The Hunger Games.” While it might have worked in 2012, I think that today’s audiences are bored of the generic “chosen one” teenaged protagonist who must fight to overthrow a dystopian government, all while having to deal with a ham-fisted romantic subplot that does nothing but drag the plot down. That being said, I did quite enjoy this movie actually as someone who read the manga. However, I in this really rare occasion hope that James Cameron did change the story of “Alita: Battle Angel”. I usually hate when hollywood change stories of the source material but to be honest the source material is not really the best cyberpunk manga. And the manga is good in it’s time however it didn’t really hold up in today standard. If i have to give it a score it is 7/10.
Salty 