ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (2019)

I'm not much of a fan of Japanese anime or manga but I am always interested enough to see a live action version out of curiosity. ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (2019) comes to the screen via James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez and does so in a spectacularly action-packed way. In fact the defining characteristic of the film is its action. It moves quickly, the action is very exciting but unfortunately it isn't an entertaining enough film. Oh, I was never bored! There are far too many sights to see for the entire two hour running time for it to be boring, but the film suffers from compacting too much story and too many characters into too little time. Plot details are so rushed that they speed by leaving some important information as a single line of dialog that is often lost in the colorful splash of action. I suspect that the script of this effort is an attempt to crush down hours of material into a narrative that is too short to allow for all the beats necessary for clarity.

The biggest problem is obvious by about an hour into the movie. The film's major flaw is that it is never engaging on an emotional level. At no point did I care at all about the characters, their fates or the various events that the plot put in front of them. There are some good performances from a few good actors but the various CGI creations are more interesting and serve the film's true purpose much better. The real reason the film exists is not to tell a story but to supply spectacle and on that count it succeeds. ALITA is awash in science fictional imagery that fairly bursts with vitality and (artificial) life. It never seems busy or overly flashy giving us a Blade Runner inspired future that feels lived in and logical, for the most part. As a setting it's fantastic but it is terminally flawed. It simply feels like a place created to tell a story instead of a place in which a story takes place. It's hollow. Pretty, but hollow. I was satisfied by the intensely detailed visuals but it never seemed like more than a backdrop built to keep us interested during the slower moments of the needlessly complex tale.

I've seen this compared to two other recent big budget science fiction films - JUPITER ASCENDING (2015) and VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (2017). All three were expensive gambles on properties that producers hoped would generate the kind of returns the well known science fiction franchises routinely garner. Indeed, I suspect that they were all attempts to create one of those huge franchises. None of them seem to have succeeded on that financial level and they gained their main notoriety from the scathing reviews directed at them. I, of course, liked both JUPITER ASCENDING and VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS and rooted for them to pull in large audiences. They were engaging, imaginative adventure fiction not afraid to be bold in story choices and visual style. They connected with me in a way that ALITA just did not. I liked watching their characters who felt like people that existed before the film began instead of being artificial constructs running through an attractively designed maze. This new film was an interesting thing to watch but it exits the mind seconds after it enters, leaving nothing useful behind. And that sequel set-up is quite sad.