A deactivated female cyborg is revived, but cannot remember anything of her past life and goes on a quest to find out who she is.
Ever since Robert Rodriguez exploded onto the scene back in 1992 with his ultra-low-budget feature, “El Mariachi,” I was a fan. The movie’s budget was roughly $7,000 and Rodriguez raised the financing for the film by participating in medical testing studies. After it won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993, Sony Pictures bought the rights to it and released the film in the United States. From there, his career took off and while he has made a slew of different movies, from low-budget shoot-em-ups (“Desperado,” “From Dusk Till Dawn”) to sci-fi classics (“The Faculty,” “Predators”), his biggest and most ambitious film lay ahead of him. With “Alita: Battle Angel,” Mr. Rodriguez teams up with the “king of the world” himself, James Cameron, and delivers, in this critic’s opinion, his most personal and awe-inspiring movie to date.
Utilizing the integration of live-action and near-flawless CGI, the story takes place in the year 2563 after a cataclysmic war called “The Fall” has left earth desecrated. Iron City is where those who were not killed in the war live and most of the city is one, big junkyard. Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) scours the wasteland, looking for salvage from the wealthy sky city of Zalem high above. One day, he discovers the torso of a female cyborg whose human brain is still intact. He brings it home with him and rebuilds her body using one he had created for his late crippled daughter and when completed, calls her Alita, also named after his daughter. Alita has no recollection of her previous life and she quickly adapts to her surroundings, falling for a local boy named Hugo (Keean Johnson), who daydreams about one day moving to Zalem. He introduces Alita to the cutthroat sport of “Motorball,” where cyborgs fight to the death and with a little encouragement and practice, she becomes very good at the game.
One night, she hears Ido come home late and when she peeks around the door, she sees that his arm has been hurt and he is covered in blood. The next day, she hears that a woman was killed the previous night not far from their home and she immediately becomes curious about Ido and his extracurricular nighttime activities. That evening, she follows him, not knowing what to expect but when three cyborg assassins try to attack him, Alita immediately springs into action and utilizing fighting skills she didn’t even know she had, terminates two of them, badly hurting the third and biggest of the lot, and their leader, Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley). He eventually retreats into the shadows and Ido tells her that he is what’s known as a Hunter-Warrior, an assassin who is tasked with hunting down and destroying dangerous, rogue cyborgs. In exchange, he receives monetary compensation and that helps him keep his medical practice open. Alita states that she wants to become a Hunter-Warrior too but Ido refuses, stating that it is too dangerous.
While out the next day with Hugo and some friends, they find a downed spaceship on the outskirts of Iron City that crashlanded into a large body of water hundreds of years ago during The Fall. Hugo tells her that people have tried over the years to access the craft but to no avail as it is alien technology. Curious, she makes her way inside and surprisingly, discovers that the ship reacts to her and that doors and panels open up for her without even having to try. When she reaches the final chamber, she uncovers a “Berserker Body,” a dynamic cyborg body created for one purpose, turning a humanoid cyborg into a skilled and devastating weapon, utilizing the most powerful martial arts fighting techniques created for cyborgs in battle, the Panzer Kunst. When she returns to Ido with it and asks him to transplant her into it, he refuses, telling her that if he were to do so, it has the ability to regenerate and evolve along with her and could adapt to her physique and brain and possibly alter her way of thinking, causing her to destroy everything in her path. She storms off and decides that she is going to become a Hunter-Warrior, just like Ido.
After a big bar brawl with numerous Hunter-Warriors, she comes up against Grewishka once more, who has been re-designed and upgraded and she is only too happy to take him on. Although she gives her best, she is no match for his enhanced strength and power and he ends up tearing her apart, with just her torso and head intact. Before he has the chance to kill her, Ido turns up with some other Hunter-Warriors who force him to retreat into the sewers. Ido now has no choice but to give her what she wants, and successfully infuses her torso with the Berserker Body. She adapts to it very quickly and starts to have flashbacks of her previous life, which she realizes was over 300 years ago and that she was a fighter in the military. When they find out that Nova, a renegade scientist who has the ability to transfer his consciousness into other people, and who operates from Zalem high above, has ordered one of his Hunter-Warriors to kill Hugo, Ido does everything he can to save him and transfers him into a cyborg body, preserving his head and memories and giving him extra-human strength. Now Alita and Hugo must try to make their way up to Zalem to stop Nova and save Iron City.
The combined talents of Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron is an auspicious one and hopefully they will re-team for more Alita adventures. I thought this was a once-off, a single story and didn’t realize until the ending, that there are many more tales within this universe, this being the first so when the movie ended and the credits began to roll, I was only getting into the film and wound up cursing under my breath at the screen. The culmination of practical special effects and CGI, thanks to Peter Jackson’s WETA, is almost on the cusp of not knowing what is real and what is not, that’s how amazingly spectacular this film really is. Rodriguez has delivered what I can only call sensational entertainment, here, the director doesn’t use CGI to blow his audience away with how impressive and eye-catching it is, instead, it becomes an extension of real-world practical effects and they are infused together seamlessly. The fight choreography and action set-pieces are exhilarating and I found myself, at times, sitting on the edge of my seat. It’s been a long time since a big-budget special effects extravaganza had that effect on me and if I had to recall exactly which movie it was, it would be “The Matrix” back in 1999.
But this film is not all about CGI and stunning visuals, at its heart, it’s a love story, plain and simple, but not one in the conventional sense. When Alita first wakes up, she has no idea where she is, or what she is, not being able to remember her former life means she is starting from scratch and that is where Rodriguez excels. Her first taste of an orange, or chocolate, is pure contentment, like watching a child eat something sweet for the very first time and see their eyes roll back in their head as the sugariness envelops them. She falls in love with everyone and everything around her, Ido, his assistant Nurse Gerhad (Idara Victor), a dog in the street, the water that flows from a faucet, she is literally, and figuratively, opening her eyes for the first time and loving everything that she comes into contact with. But when she falls for Hugo, and he expresses feelings for her too, she can’t quite figure out how it might work but after Ido transfers her into the Berserker Body, because it uses nanotechnology, it means that every single fiber of her body can feel absolutely everything in and around her and when Hugo kisses her for the very first time, the expression on her face literally brought me to tears. It reminded me of my very first kiss years ago and even though actress Rosa Salazar, who plays Alita, used motion capture for her performance, much like Andy Serkis did as Gollum in “Lord of the Rings,” here, her body language and physical response to the kiss were utterly captivating and heartwarming, I could literally feel her zest for life awaken. It was such a simple yet effective scene and one that has stayed with me since.
“Alita: Battle Angel” will not be to everybody’s liking, it is a big sci-fi opus and even if sci-fi is not your thing, give it a chance, you might actually find yourself enjoying it and wiping the occasional tear from your eye.
Now available on Digital HD and on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray 3D, Blu-ray, and DVD July 23rd
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