Directed by: Robert Rodriguez
Starring: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Mahershala Ali, Keean Johnson, Jennifer Connelly
Rated PG-13, 122 minutes
A common thread in dystopian sci-fi cinema is the worthlessness of life in a future marked by overpopulation and resource depletion. Whether it’s the desperate starving crowds in 1973’s “Soylent Green” or the vertical shantytowns of last year’s “Ready Player One,” Hollywood likes to show us how the world will become an increasingly grim place as this millennium continues, how the lives of individuals will mean less and less under the oppressive rule of billionaires and their robots.
This is why the questions at the root of these movies are so fundamental: what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live? In the future, it will be important to know. “Blade Runner” and “Blade Runner 2049” grappled with these questions while also asking how technology might change our answers; the “Hunger Games” movies used suspense and horror to remind us that life, no matter how bleak, compels us to keep living at all costs. Even “Ready Player One” was a cautionary tale, warning against numbing ourselves to real-world suffering by hiding online.
What, then, is the question at the heart of “Alita: Battle Angel”? This is a clean-looking movie with well-composed action sequences and a solid anchor in the form of Rosa Salazar, but the storytelling is nearsighted; Robert Rodriguez (“Sin City”) has done painstaking work to craft a rich imaginary world, a world which remains largely unexplored at the film’s end. This is an entertaining movie, but as lacking in substance as unbuttered popcorn.
That’s not to say a good movie can’t rely on its entertainment value alone, but “Alita” is entertaining only in fits, too often mired instead in bland exposition, which only makes it more frustrating that the movie is as difficult to follow as it is. The gist is simple enough—the inventor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz, “Inglourious Basterds”) discovers the remains of a cyborg in a rubbish heap and brings her back to life. The cyborg, whom he names Alita (Salazar, “Parenthood”), has no memory of her past, but soon finds out that she’s programmed for combat. As she seeks answers about her past, she uncovers a massive government conspiracy of oppression and deceit, a conspiracy tied up directly with her own past, and she realizes she’s the only one strong enough to fight it.
Then you throw in the romantic subplot, the sports subplot, the dead-child subplot, and a swarm of bounty hunters, and the story quickly gets out of hand. It’s a shame that “Alita” is such an unwieldy mess, because when the pieces click, they form a mesmerizing display of what filmmakers are capable of in 2019. The fight scenes and racing scenes are shot with clarity and precision and flair; Robert Rodriguez is no stranger to action, having cut his teeth on smaller-scale films like “From Dusk Till Dawn” and “Sin City,” so the bigger scale (and much bigger budget) of “Alita” feels like a welcome next step for him. The visual effects are also smooth and consistent; for a main character whose eyes are digitally edited to be larger than normal, Alita is not off-putting in the way that such effects usually are. Her appearance is uncanny, but apt. And Rosa Salazar, in the few moments when she has the opportunity, shows herself to be an impressively naturalistic actor, even while playing a cyborg. It’s her performance—even as she’s surrounded by Oscar winners like Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, and Mahershala Ali—that gives the audience what little grounding we have.
The film’s biggest problem, then, is that it isn’t greater than the sum of these individual parts. And Rodriguez seems to know that his film doesn’t add up to much; it ends abruptly, without closure, leaving us with little more than hints at what’s to come in the sequel. It’s one thing to get a teaser, but it’s another to spend two hours in a theater only to find out you were watching the prologue to the movie you actually came to see. That the movie wastes our time like this, that it fails to convince us of its significance, contradicts its own assertion that we have to remember the value of individuals and their stories; “Alita” is what it looks like to forget.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 3/8/19.