'Alita: Battle Angel' is a cute sci-fi movie that is a fun time at the cinema.
Rating: 3/5
Taking place in the year 2563, a world disaster known as “The Fall” has left the earth ravaged. Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) find a dismembered female cyborg with a human brain, Alita (Rosa Salazar), who suffers from memory loss and is in search of finding out how she is.
Oscar-winning director James Cameron takes a break from his plethora of 'Avatar' sequels currently in producing to write and produce 'Alita: Battle Angel', getting 'Machete Kills' director Robert Rodriguez at the helm of this sci-fi adventure. This is a film, for lack of a better word, that’s a serviceable sci-fi film and the best manga to film adaption we’ve had thus far.
The script is fine, the acting is fine and the CGI, for the most part, is fine. However, there’s nothing about the film that makes it special.
The actors don’t really have any chemistry and are very self-aware of the predictable nature of the film.
The upside is that the screenwriters played with the self-awareness which does end with some giggle out loud moments.
However, the screenplay is very basic and twists in the movie aren’t a surprise since you can see them coming a mile away.
Alita’s motion capture work is pretty good especially the use of anime eyes for the character. But during fight sequences and CGI heavy scenes, however, in real-world settings she appears to be in that uncanny CGI valley. Where she sort of looks as if she is physically in the scene you can still notice she is a CGI character.
Near the end of the film, it was also very obvious that they had either run out of time or budget since the movie started looking like a video game cut scene.
'Alita: Battle Angel' is a film that falls into the mediocre section of films that have been released so far. It’s neither good nor bad and is worth the watch on the big screen, but I wouldn’t rush out to go see it.