In the Flesh: Alita: Battle Angel

There's not much to Alita: Battle Angel, which can of course be fine for an action movie. There's not much to Drunken Master when you get right down to it, and that's one of the most balls-out fun and exciting movies ever made. Drunken Master, thought has clean, fast-paced, inventive fight choreography and a traditional Cantonese score that absolutely rips. Alita has some alright action, some good action, and a sappy, sentimental soundtrack that never fails to detract from whatever's happening in director Robert Rodriguez's flat and suffocating shots.

Alita's fight choreography ranges from brutal and breathless to depressingly phoned in. Alita's (Rosa Salazar) underground duel with the hulking cyborg Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley) is tense and moody, the murk and clutter serving to conceal the worst of the CGI's shortcomings, but their final confrontation is awkwardly staged and overly talky, its tension sapped by the immobile lifelessness of the participants. Rodriguez can't even muster perfunctory shots of feet shifting or eyes narrowing, and without tension or physicality it feels less like a roller coaster than a Boston harbor tour. By contrast the Motorball sequences in which cyborgs hurtle around a track on skates and pound one another into scrap are much livelier, the violence balletic and impactful. 

Salazar's CGI'ed Alita is surprisingly charming, though in concept she's exactly the lethal nymphette I'd expect three boring older men like Jon Landau, James Cameron, and Robert Rodriguez to cook up between them. The politics of a bunch of crusty dudes ginning up an unstoppable killing machine who just so happens to look like a teenage sex kitten, even to the extent that she's a motion capture cyber-waif superimposed over a real actress, are obviously gross. I don't know what else to say about that except "imagine if the jerkoffs who collect sexy anime statuettes had a hundred million dollars and insider access to Hollywood?"

The world in which Alita's standard story of inequality and rebellion unfolds is unremarkable. A floating city, a sprawling ghetto beneath it, and hordes of drudges wishing for a better life. It's the stuff on which dystopian YA trilogies like The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner were built, and with its transparently fake visuals and uninteresting set dressing Alita is very much cast in their mold. The late-game cyborgification of a key character is so laughably ugly to look at that it's a relief when he's shredded by an enormous spinning ring of blades. 

Speaking of characters, obviously no one's bringing their A-game here except for Salazar, whose breathy voice and eager, violent body language inject more life into Alita than the script or the character really deserve. Christoph Waltz gives the acting equivalent of elevator music as Dr. Dyson Ido, Alita's surrogate father and also a surgeon and also a bounty hunter, and Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali aren't far behind him. Alita's love interest, Hugo (Keean Johnson), is a bland Hollywood nothing, his face devoid of character, his performance utterly unmemorable aside from the STAGGERINGLY bizarre way he delivers the line "Oranges? That's unacceptable." As soon as I heard it I imagined all the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys hollering "Oranges?!?! That's UNACCEPTABLE." in increasingly strident voices.

Alita's a perfectly fun time at the movies, but in hands other than Rodriguez's it might have been so much better. The man's squandered the career riding Quentin Tarantino's coattails got him. His infatuation with his own bog-standard imagination burdens everything he does, and he's got none of Tarantino's facility with the camera. Every inch of Alita is ugly, even the lovingly sculpted CGI ass we spend much of the movie staring at. Rodriguez's problem is that he wants to be an exploitation director but he has no idea what's sexy or what makes violence exciting to watch. He just circles sex and bloodshed endlessly, eternally fascinated and perpetually unable to make contact, like a helicopter trying to land in a crowded McDonald's parking lot.