Alita: Battle Angel went through years of lying in drawers that I won’t talk about, and finally brought Cameron out in the sun of the day as a screenwriter and producer, and Rodriguez as a director. By the way, Alita is an adaptation of the Japanese cyberpunk manga Gunm or Alita: Battle Angel, by Yukito Kishiro.
The story takes place some five hundred years in the future, and three hundred of the mysterious Fall. Then, in the war, all the heavenly cities were destroyed, except one, Zalem. Beneath it, on earth, arose the megalopolis Iron City, where ordinary people, unworthy of height, live and struggle to survive. So Dr. Ido (Christoph Waltz) finds a visibly damaged cyborg with the head of a young girl in the trash one day. She discovers that her brain is alive, but also something special that beats in her chest. In his office, he gives her a synthetic body and Alita, a young cyborg girl, is born, with no memory of her life so far. Alita, getting to know the world around her, discovers her special possibilities, which will lead her into great temptations and dangers…
Without any special dissection, I can say the following about Alita. The creative duo made a real treat for all fans of sci-fi / fantasy / manga with all the side dishes and Kolo pride. Visually, Alita looks impressive. Alita herself and the whole world around her are done to the smallest detail perfectly and you can see exactly that lucid touch of Cameron, which he has shown us countless times so far. The effects are at the highest level, and the portrayal of the cyborg girl Alita, as well as other cyborgs, robots and miracles, is phenomenal. Rodriguez enters into that visual perfection of Cameron with his antics, so that the film abounds with hilarious and fierce action scenes and chases. This in itself will be enough for all fans of the genre to rush to the cinema and give their eyes two hours of visual massage and enjoyment.
However, a couple of strange (or not so strange, time will tell) decisions of the creators themselves made sure that the first blockbuster of this year was not made crazy at all levels. Perhaps the problem is the long-term stretching of the film until the final production. Maybe the author’s vision went far ahead, so they just drove us crazy with this part, leaving us waiting for some new sequels. Maybe there was no inspiration, no time, or maybe it was too complicated to digest it all in one movie. Anyway, the problem that you (us who split, so we want the whole package) as the film progresses, slowly but surely, breaks down the script itself.
The world of Alita is, to say the least, interesting. The cyber punk environment is filled with many colorful characters, who, I’m sure, have a lot to tell us. Many of them are involved in the mainstream of the story. However, apart from Alita, played by the great Rosa Salazar (Rodriguez’s oil which, for who knows how many times, ignites) and to some extent others. Ida, the other characters have no or very little room to meet them. This is even the case with Alita’s romantic interest in the form of young Hugo. They all somehow swim around the story and, for a moment, dive into it, but the faster the better they disappear from it as if fleeing for air. So you can only speculate about the motives of all these many characters, guided by the crumbs that the authors threw at us.
The same is the case with the world in which the action takes place. So much is present, but we learn nothing more than just along the way and superficially. So it is not very clear who, what, how, why, where and so on. However, in this adrenaline fantasy, it could have happened if there was not one important thing, which, at least towards the end of the film, hit me in the middle of the face. That horrible realization that as you get closer to the end, you will not find out anything, nor will the main things be resolved. In that, I can freely say, television serial mode of bringing to an end some episode or the last episode of Walking Dead before the winter break, many things are speeding up, some are leaving, some are staying. You stay seated, watching the check-out rush hour with the gloomy feeling that you were watching the first part of something, that they took your plate off the table when it was sweetest. And the sequel still? It may or may not be. It probably depends on the bunch of greens, or the height of the same.
