Movie of the Week: Alita, Battle Angel

[jacey]

I'm not sure what to say about this movie. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Would I like to watch it again? Not particularly.

Don't get me wrong the visuals are stunningly good, though I'm not that fond of manga. The future setting has a floating city above and a dog-eat-dog world down below.
When a prosthetics/robotics specialist finds a deactivated cyborg in a massive junk dump he takes her home, gets her working and treats her as his daughter, even giving her his daughter's name. Alita wakes with no knowledge of her past life. Christoph Waltz is the 'dad' and Rosa Salazar is the cyborg, digitally enhanced to give her enormous eyes. It's very manga, but also a bit uncanny valley.

The storyline is Alita finding out who she is and what she's capable of and then kicking ass. There's a lot of chasing about without an enormous amount of character development. The CGI is brilliant, though, as you would expect from James Cameron and Weta Workshop