Alita: Battle Angel

Spare Parts
or
Little Orphan Gally (Sappiness is a Warm Gunnm)

It is the year 2563 and the separation between the have's and have-not's is evident at all times. Floating above "Iron City" is the pleasure-dome of Zalem, and the city in disrepair below it is, literally, its dumping ground. It is where Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), a brilliant cyber-surgeon of limited means, finds an angel...or part of one, anyway. 

Doc has been living in a self-imposed exile in Iron City, repairing its citizens, providing them with replacement parts for whatever has been ripped from them in the rough world of Iron City. Money is not a concern—he will take a bag or oranges for fixing a busted cyber-arm, if it will do the most good. He could have made good money creating freaks and cyber-monsters for the Moneyball tournaments that serve as bread and circuses for the disadvantaged to take their minds off being disadvantaged ("better football than revolution, right?")

Hunting for spare parts to use in his work, he finds the head and torso of an android female and looks at it and takes it home. using the discarded android body he had designed for his paralyzed daughter—murdered when a cyber-ruffian burst into his lab looking for drugs—Ido puts the little android together and calls her "Alita,"(Rosa Salazar, motion capped) his daughter's name. He doesn't know her background, doesn't know her history or function. But, he takes on the role of father-mentor and protector in a world where "people do terrible things."

Alita: Battle Angel went through "development hell" for many years, acquired by James Cameron after being introduced to the manga and its video by Guillermo del Toro, some time after he'd made Titanic. Cameron tinkered with a script, developed technologies, and ultimately used them to make Avatar and its (how many are anticipated?) sequels. Alita was put on a very back-burner until Cameron approached Robert Rodriguez, a director with a great sense of economy, but often not the vision to try and make something out of the property, or at least get it back on track. Rodriguez's first job was to try and fashion a script out of the many begun by Cameron that never seemed to gel. But, Rodriguez managed to squeeze into his script the first four books to the satisfaction of Cameron and producer Jon Landau, and the movie got made to the tune of 170 million dollars, Rodriguez's biggest budget by many factors.

The film that is cobbled together from the first four "Gunnm"/"Gally" books has the establishment of the Zalem-Iron city dichotomy, the murder of some women "Jack the Ripper"-style (which briefly makes Ido himself a suspect-perp), Alita's relationship with a street-punk named "Yugo" ("Hugo" in the film, played by Keean Johnson), and her emergence as a star-participant in a vicious roller derby game thoroughly based on the one in Rollerball; it's called "Moneyball" because...lawyers.

Frankly, they could have done without the "Ripper" sub-plot, even though it establishes a strata of Iron-ites as "hunter-warriors"—vigilante/bounty hunters who dis-assemble the most predatory of the cyber-human hybrids, who all seem to be associated with the Moneyball games, if only tangentially, through the person of one of the many bad-guys, Vector (Mahershala Ali*), who seems to be the Iron City mega-promoter of the games and its chief supplier of cyber-enhancements to keep the games...interesting.

There wasn't a need to make a third version of Rollerball. The movie wasn't a success in 1975 (nor was its 2002 re-boot), either financially or artistically, when Norman Jewison made it, and its same point about distracting an oppressed populace can be made, far more directly and relevantly, by making a football film. There is virtually no difference between Alita's "Moneyball" games and the "rollerball" concept right through to the no-holds-barred playing strategies or the "jam-the-ball-in-the-hole" concept of what constitutes a goal. Rollerball had motorcycles involved, but that's about it.

Alita rivets together Rollerball with "Tinocchio" and "Chromeo and Screwliet" with some seams showing through the solder, as they try to crunch four of the "Gally" stories into one movie. It gives short-shrift to Ido's development (which may be why Waltz gives one of his "uncommitted" performances) as there's never a point where he changes attitude from paternalistic protectiveness to his eventual "show 'em what you're made of" boosterism when she decides to enter a rigged Moneyball championship.

Rodriguez gets the spectacle down cold, but some of his futurism is a bit weird—the one wheeled motorcycles that pop up seem ludicrously stabilized for their design. Alita—the character—has big Disney-princess-eyes (the only one who does, curiously) to reflect its manga origins, but the movie is very Anglicized, with touches of Rodriguez's latino roots thrown in, more than its Japanese origins. Some of the editing is very rough with those continuity flaws "they" love to throw in IMDB's "Goofs" sections, and I'm still trying to figure out how Alita got her feet back after Ido replaces them with some nifty plug-in skates for the tournament. I'm sure some of it can be explained that it messed up the pacing, but given the other things, I think it was done "because they had to." "It's only a movie, Ingrid."

However, some of the work is stellar, especially when Rodriguez and his technicians stop reaching for photo-realism and make the thing move with an almost Chuck Jones-cartoon precision. As, below:

Now...let's wade hip-deep into Alita: Battle Angel and its place in the current political climate. Of course, it doesn't need to be and is a false flag in any political discussion because Alita is hardly political, making its point in sociological terms, merely. 

But...a certain sub-strata of internet commentators have chosen to make it political by bitching that Alita is a better representation of a female character than a "woke" "social warrior" movie (in their view) than say, Captain Marvel. This is not true. That sub-set just "feels" that way because Alita—to them—is a better representation of women, with her big eyes and her doll-like proportions (would that be more structurally sound for a robot rather than being heftier?) because it adheres more to the concept they prefer, which can be described as "the kind men like." Even if Alita wasn't petite and reminded one of a emaciated gymnast, she is also emotionally naive...in the way men like.

The second Alita story-line involves her becoming emotionally drawn to a street-tough named Hugo, whose dream is to live in Zalem, is working for Vector, makes his livelihood by dismembering hybrids for their spare parts and even sets up Alita for being demolished in the Moneyball tournament. Alita knows nothing of this—save for his Zalem upward-mobility—but even when she learns that he has worked against her, she loves him so much, she still forgives him and wants to be with him, despite it all.

What jerk wouldn't be attracted to that concept? Alita's devotion is unconditional, while his is based purely for his benefit. It doesn't matter that he's a scumbag, she Capital-♥ loves him, no matter what crap—or cyber spine—he pulls. This does not compute, and makes sense only in a male fantasy of uneven relationships and warped power dynamics.

At one point (and I started giggling uproariously while watching this, upsetting some in the theater) Alita offers Hugo her heart—her mechanical heart, pulling it right out of her chest and holds it out to him. One wonders how seriously this was taken by the film-makers: is it "on the nose" what they meant to represent, or was it meant to be a satirical joke because, hey, she's a robot. I chose to think of it a third way...as ridiculous. 

Personally, I would have liked her to grab him by his mullet and say, "Ya wanna get to Zalem, meat-monkey? Let's see how far I can THROW ya!" I think that would have been far more cathartic than Alita playing weak and deferential to her inferior-in-all-ways man-child.

But, I'm sure it played well for the boys still playing with girl-toys.

"It's only a movie, Ingrid"

* This is the first performance by this wonderful actor (two Oscars?) where he seems a bit lost and so, takes the role slowly, while still managing to differentiate between the character when normal and when "possessed"—never actually explained how (or why he doesn't do it to everybody) by the Big Heavy "Mabuse"-like Zalem kingpin named Nova (played by Edward Norton—and where has he been outside of Wes Anderson movies?) who runs the games like an overlord.