There is a lot to enjoy here, but is it enough to warrant the $200 million price tag?
James Cameron clearly knows his way around sci-fi. From The Terminator to Aliens to T2 to Avatar, every time he has dipped his King Of The World toe into the genre, it has resulted in a massive success.
For years Cameron has been trying to make Alita: Battle Angel, an adaptation of the hit Manga series, but between waiting for the technology to catch up with his vision, and then getting caught up making Avatar sequels for the foreseeable future, he has ultimately had to drop it from his schedule.
In the meantime, big budget sci-fi has become something of a risk. Sure, the go-to's can still pull it off, with Nolan (Inception, Interstellar), Scott (The Martian, Prometheus), and of course Spielberg (Ready Player One), but more often than not, if it isn't directly related to Star Wars or Marvel, then your sci-fi is going to have a rough go of it at the box office.
Just think of huge productions like Jupiter Ascending, Tomorrowland, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets, or Mortal Engines. Even with big name directors and cutting edge visual effects, audiences just don't seem to turn out as regularly for the genre as they used to.
And so we come back to Alita: Battle Angel, a $200 million production, but now directed by Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, From Dusk Til Dawn). Even with a script that still has Cameron's name attached as a co-writer, it is hard to see this movie as anything but another entry into the "Big Swing, Big Miss" category.
Let's get the good stuff out of the way first: the movie looks exceptional. Go see it on as big a screen as possible, as Rodriguez effectively devises a somewhat original vision for this sorta-dystopian future, successfully managing to not lean on either of two obvious pillars of sci-fi aesthetics, which are neon, slick 'n' rainy (Blade Runner, The Matrix) or arid, depressing 'n' rundown (Mad Max, Elysium).
Against the backdrop of a believably futuristic, war-surviving society, we've got a great cast doing decent work, from Christoph Waltz as a do-gooder cyborg doctor (that is a doctor for cyborgs, not a cyborg who is a doctor), Jennifer Connolly as his ex-wife and now rival doctor, Mahershala Ali as a shady backroom dealer and Connolly's current beau, and relative newcomer Keean Johnson as a good guy who is constantly forced to do bad things just to survive.
They're all drawn into Alita's story (played by Rosa Salazar, walking a tightrope between wide-eyed wonder and total kick-ass with finesse), a cyborg with no memory of who she is or where she came from, but the fact that the people in power want her dead must mean she is more important than anyone realises.
Her story is regularly interspersed with some hi-octane action scenes, paced at a speed that seems appropriate for hyper-agile cyborgs that give them a jittery, unique edge, plus the rules of no-guns allowed by any civilians forces the set-pieces to think outside the box for answers that most other movies would respond to with bullets.
So, yeah, a lot to enjoy.
But throughout the movie, an old screenwriting tip kept echoing through the cinema-screen: Is this the most interesting part of your character's story, and if not, why aren't we watching that instead?
All the way through, Alita keeps having fragmented flashbacks to a battle she took part in before losing her memory, and that battle looks awesome. Also, this movie keeps nodding forwards, towards a hoped-for sequel with some bigger and better fights with more interesting and more fleshed-out antagonists, who also look awesome.
So we're stuck with what seems like the least interesting part of Alita's life, with most of the run-time spent with all of the important information kept just out of reach in both the past and the future, resulting in a series of scenes featuring a series of characters waiting for someone to remember something more interesting than what we're watching right now.
It just doesn't make for very compelling viewing, following a hero who can't take action because the reasons for taking any such action haven't been made too clear to her, or to us.
And so we wait.
Hopefully the promised sequel will give both Alita, and us, more to do.
Alita: Battle Angel is released in Irish cinemas from Wednesday 6 February.
Clip via 20th Century Fox UK
