Writers: Robert Rodriguez, Laeta Kalogridis & James Cameron 

Director: Robert Rodriguez 

The writer and director Richard Ayoade once said that ‘actors are the most important thing in a film and there are many examples of actors transcending poor material.’ I personally don’t agree with this and the script is ultimately the most important thing, as that’s the base from which whole film is constructed. Alita: Battle Angel does contain two performances that does offer proof that actors can engage an audience when the script fails to do so.  

Co-written by Avator’s James Cameron and directed Robert Rodriguez, Alita: Battle Angel is the story of an eponymous teenage cyborg struggling to find her identity in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Based on a manga series called Gunnm, the film is set in 2563 in Iron City, 300 years after a war with the United Republic of Mars (URM) ravaged the Earth. It’s all so very standard sci-fi, with flashes of Cameron’s own Terminator to RoboCop to the ever present Metropolis.  

Like all poorly written films, the script is both simple and convoluted. Christoph Waltz’s Dr Ido finds a half-dead cyborg girl in junkyard and rebuilds her, and when she awakes she cannot remember anything about her past life. The film follows Alita as she attempts to find out who she was and who she is, while falling in love with Dr Ido’s assistant Hugo (Keean Johnson). Earth’s main entertainment is a sport called ‘Motorball’ a kind of mix of basketball and Nascar, where people in super-fast robotic suits battle around a track to score baskets. Alita longs to be one of the players but the game is run by Mahershala Ali’s Vector, who is an evil business overlord and set on killing her. He intends to kill Alita because, inevitably, she is last of her kind. She is a long lost URM soldier, the deadliest killing machine Mars ever produced.  

Alita is a bizarre mixture of dystopian sc-fi and teen romance. There a fighting robots and authoritarian governments mixed with scenes in which Alita and Hugo kiss for the first time in the rain. Seriously. The film is that reductive. We are treated to almost beautifully bad dialogue; ‘it’s a harsh world. The strong prey on the weak down here.’ The film hits its plot beats so predictably it could have been written by an A.I. machine that had recently had a stroke. During the films concluding fight sequence, a cyborg bounty hunter called Zaper who has been hunting Alita, has his human face sliced off. He starts jumping around and shouting ‘my face! My face! My beautiful face!’ I can feel the bile in the bottom of my throat beginning to fizz again.  

However, the film is not without merit. Rosa Salazar as Alita does provide the film’s main character with a real humanity. She manages to get the audience to see past her exaggerated, anime eyes and you believe she is a real teenager trying to find her place in the world. Christoph Waltz is excellent as Alita’s essentially adopted father and cyborg surgeon Dr Ido. He brings a world-weariness to the role and the weight of living under conditions of tyranny shines through. The film’s battle and action sequences are pleasantly lucid; Robert Rodriguez’s direction is clear and concise, it is very easy to follow the scene even when there are 10 cyborgs having a scrap at high-speed.  

This a very poor film that contains a couple of good performances and some impressive action sequences that make you forgot some of its more snort-inducing aspects. The film is very much set up to be the first in a series, with Edward Norton popping up at the end as some kind of evil overlord. Whether we will get them or not remains to be seen. However, I’m not sure whether my (less than) beautiful face could take anymore.  

4/10