Alita: Battle Angel is directed by Robert Rodriguez and co-written and produced by James Cameron and takes place 300 years after the Fall and a cybernetic surgeon (Christoph Waltz) finds the remains of a young girl named Alita (Rosa Salazar) in a junkyard, she is reassembled with a new body and begins to learn all about the world as she tries to rediscover her memory and evade the dark forces who want to capture her.
I enjoyed Alita: Battle Angel though mainly for its amazing visual effects and action setpieces, the level of detail in the world Cameron and Rodriguez create is amazing and first off the motion capture work here is superb and tops the work Cameron did on Avatar 10 years ago it all looks very lifelike and very real, almost as real as watching actors live on set performing the scenes and Ms Salazar is very good as Alita bringing a real sense of humanity to what could have been a cartoon character with no life behind the eyes.
The action set pieces here are also very good with a real sense of clarity and movement to them, every move is easy to follow and it nicely remembers to keep Alita’s actions in her fight scenes front and centre, the Motor Ball scenes in particular are a lot of fun and seeing all of this detailed effects work has got me wondering what Cameron truly has in store for us with the Avatar sequels as I have the feeling we will not be disappointed.
As for the other performances Mr Waltz is fine but he’s kind of starting to play himself by this point and he could really do with a strong hand on the directorial whip to guide him somewhat into giving a great performance, it was nice to see Jennifer Connelly in a movie again and she has aged very very well and Maehershala Ali is his usual king of cool and captain of charisma self and he is reminding me an awful lot of Denzel Washington in his younger days when he held both of those titles.
As for the storytelling itself it is okay but it lacks that certain Cameron touch that he brought to the likes of the 2 Terminator films, Aliens, Titanic and even Avatar which was a very traditional natives vs colonisers story but it was one I thought worked quite well whereas here it was the standard sort of cyborg teen girl story which again was okay but is easily this movie’s weakest link.
And so that was Alita: Battle Angel and the Visual Effects and Action setpieces are breathtaking even if the central storytelling was not as good, 3 out of 5.
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