Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

The Oscars are tonight!  Are you excited?  I didn't get to see as many of the nominees as I wanted but I gave it my best shot.  There's always next year.  Now we can focus on this year's movie offerings, which includes Alita:  Battle Angel.    So this is adapted from a very long-running and beloved Japanese manga.  James Cameron initiated the project like fifteen years ago but could never get it off the ground so he handed it off to Robert Rodriguez.  I don't think this significantly improved the film but I also don't think it would have been better off with Cameron.  I'm not sure who could have made this a movie worth seeing.

Alita (Rosa Salazar) is a cyborg found by Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) on a scrap heap.  Since her brain was intact, Ido took her home and implanted her in the mechanical body he had made for his deceased teenage daughter.  We'll discuss how creepy that is in a minute.  Alita is thrilled with her new life but soon chafes at the rules Ido imposes.  She meets Hugo (Keean Johnson), cramming every "bad boy with a heart of gold" trope that can fit under a leather jacket, and instantly falls in love.  Hugo's dream in life is to one day go to the floating city of Zalem to be among the elites.  To that end, he works odd jobs for Vector (Mahershala Ali), a wealthy gangster and patron to the big cyborg sport of Motorball.  Vector is a pawn of Nova (Edward Norton), one of Zalem's chief architects, and is soon instructed to kill Alita by any means necessary.  During her first fight, she begins to recover some of her memories and begins piecing together her previous life.

Okay.  So the cringe factor is pretty high on this one.  First, there's the weirdness with Ido finding a cyborg head in the garbage and putting it on his dead kid's body, calling her by the dead kid's name, and forbidding her from going out at night.  Then there's Alita's immediate assumption that her adopted father is a serial killer, based on nothing more than hearing there's a serial killer in the city and seeing him come in wounded from a night out.  That seems like a pretty huge logical leap and also some shitty writing.  Ick factor number three is the romantic subplot with Hugo, a storyline which made zero sense and was annoying.  He's literally the first boy she lays eyes on in her new prepubescent body and she falls head over heels, immediately.  Have we not progressed past the lazy "Romeo and Juliet" meet cute?  Did Frozen teach these people nothing?  All of Alita's decision-making in the last half of the movie is heavily reliant on Hugo's action and while it's kind of nice to see a dude get fridged for once, it makes her character weaker unnecessarily.

This is clearly set up to be the first in a trilogy but I don't know if it's going to make enough money to justify that course.  I certainly wouldn't see a second one despite the top-notch visuals.  Life is too short to waste on a film that feels so dated.