With so many sophisticated movies and series about android and dystopian future out there, the 20th Century Fox’s Alita: Battle Angel instead offers something remarkably simple that makes it stood out yet underwhelming at the same time: an innocent love story.
This post contains spoilers and my personal opinion. Reader discretion is advised.
Imagine the future where technology had become so advanced that the human race finally found a way to segregate themselves from whom they perceived as a lesser being by creating cities that float, away from a barren land underneath filled with men and women who worked to sustain the first-class living up there.
People down under grew more restless by the day, starting a great war known as The Fall that destroys the civilisation. Most cities had fallen but one named Zalem remained with enough ego to enslave the whole world.
Three hundred years later, the devastating aftermath of The Fall still lingered.
Men and women of the Iron City worked for the people of Zalem above. At times, they flirted with immortality by replacing ailing parts of their bodies, bits by bits, leaving only their conscious and memories intact.
Right in the middle of such an absurd social construct and the diminishing means of being a human, a cyborg-specialised doctor named Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) found a cyborg core in a dumpster. After he figured out that the core was still alive, he then decided to attach it into a synthetic body that was meant for his late daughter.
Understandably, Ido named his masterpiece Alita after his own daughter. Little did he know, Alita (Rosa Salazar) was never an ordinary girl.
Alita, who later slowly regained her memory, woke up as a blank canvas. She remembered nothing, let alone knowing that she was once a warrior, part of the troops that almost succeeded in bringing down a tyrant.
“You told me the story of the war when the ground shook and the sky burned,” Alita said. “Of the ones that survived who awoke to a different world, where the powerful can prey on you.”
The movie went to a promising start —intelligent dialogues, floating city, transferable consciousness, Ido’s possible Dr Jekyll/Mr. Hyde scenario — but things started to go south just after several minutes into the story when Alita met her love interest, Hugo (Keean Johnson).
The thing is, Hugo tore down cyborgs and sold their parts for a living. Alita is a cyborg. This is the first of many ironies that will be resolved magically in the movie or simply forgotten.
“It’s a harsh world down here. You’ve got to be willing to do what it takes,” Hugo said.
Let’s jump to the middle of the movie when Alita opened up her chest, quite literally, and offered Hugo her beating heart to be sold as a means to pay his way into the floating city above.
It could be a touching scene to show how innocent — and gullible — Alita was, yet it failed to deliver and almost felt sarcastic somehow.
Hugo, who seemed to be burdened by his guilt for being a cyborg-stripping thug — refused the offer. However, thanks to the idea planted by Vector (Mahershala Ali), he told Alita to compete in Motorball instead. The ultimate winner of Motorball will be allowed to move to Zalem.
At first, viewers were led to believe that Vector and Ido’s ex-wife are the villain of this story. Vector being a rich businessman and Ido’s ex-wife being a genius cyborg doctor are the ultimate pair to run a Motorball competition in which the contenders are highly specialised, combat-ready cyborgs.
But here’s a twist: Vector was not alone. He was always controlled by Nova, a mad scientist from Zalem who wanted Alita dead after he found out that she could be a threat for being a warrior with enough resources to tear down a tyrant.
Apparently, the so-called Motorball competition is the pièce de résistance of this movie.
Everything led to that moment when Alita was all geared up, ready to play Motorball which was actually an ambush. Alita, of course, managed to get out of the competition not only alive but managed to save Hugo as well.
Long story short, Hugo’s obsession to Zalem never faded and he died trying to reach the floating city. Sadly, his death seemed unimportant despite the fact that he had always been around since the beginning and he was the reason Alita went to this mess.
Supposed to be a genius mess
Coming from the brilliant minds that brought you Avatar (James Cameron), Sin City (Robert Rodriguez), and Altered Carbon (Laeta Kalogridis), I think it’s fair to say that I expect so much from the movie.
It promised many possible storylines, flirted with so many philosophical questions and meanings but as it turned out, the movie struggled to choose one and complete it.
It ended up with an easy fix: a story of a girl meets a boy.
I remember I was sitting on the edge of my seat, hoping that Alita: Battle Angel would be a bad-ass story about an angel who battles the shit out of a tyrant. And then, I was hoping the movie will at least be inspired by likes of Blade Runner’s dystopian future which raises the issue of human-cyborg love or discuss the possibility of immortality just like the one on Netflix's Altered Carbon.
But I was mistaken.
I thought the movie had all the right ingredients to make a coherent, deep, meaningful story but I was struggling to find the movie’s core issue or where it stood. It resolved things in a way that was too superficial which I found it hard to believe or related to. Maybe it was never meant to be.
In conclusion, the movie is an entertaining show but not a satisfying one. I’d say go watch it because it offers amazing graphics and talented casts — well, not all casts are amazing. I’m unsure about Johnson’s Hugo. Keep in mind to enjoy the movie and don’t make the same mistake as I did: I took this movie too seriously.
