I Watch Movies: Alita: Battle Angel
It’s been, let’s say, at least 20 years since I saw the anime version of this. If you wisely did not flirt with Japanese science fiction cartoons in the 90s then good for you. Let me just say that I had a hazy memory of a few scenes and images and yes, they were all in this.
Iron City is under the last flying city Zalam, all thanks to the “Fall”, a war with URM 300 years ago. Cybersurgeon Dr Dyson Ido finds a disembodied cyborg head and shoulders in the scrap thrown from the city, realises it has URM technology and grafts it to his dead daughter’s cyber-body*. She’s an amnesiac so he gives her his daughter’s name, Alita, and tries to teach her about Iron City. Obviously she goes out and learns more on her own. There are lots of cyborgs, no guns, a sport called Motorball (cyborg Rollerball), cyber-part jackers, and hunter-warriors, the bounty hunters the Factory uses as law enforcement, though also they have the centurion battle machines so that may be outsourcing for the sake of it, or may be a deliberate attempt to make Iron City cool.
Alita learns a little about her past, discovers she’s really good at Motorball and also fighting, discovers and makes enemies, falls in love and has several spectacular set-piece fights and weird body part emotional drama scenes. Making her ever-so-slightly uncanny valley CGI, a photo-realistic animated character in a world of actual humans, is a good effect. In all it feels as though it’s jammed a lot of different and interesting ideas into one film and not really tried to sort them out. Which was the case with the anime too, but I don’t expect Japanese cartoons to make sense, or at least I’m not disappointed when it doesn’t.
Watch This: Cool cyborg fights and some moments of real science fiction drama
Don’t Watch This: If the grim city under a glorious flying city sounds too obvious a metaphor to you and then when you watch it you find it’s not really used at all.
* For Sale, Girl’s Cyber-body, Never Used.
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