Director: Robert RodriguezÂ
Cast: Rosa Salazar, Eiza González, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Christoph Waltz, Casper Van Dien, Jackie Earle Haley, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Ed Skrein, Keean Johnson
Rating: 12A
Running time: 121 mins
Release date:Â 06/02/2019
Maybe it’s his mellowing as a family man alongside his deserved status as a true cinematic visionary, but James Cameron might well have found a calling by delegating creative choices and responsibility to others. Although AVATAR remains one of the modern cinema’s true revolutionary experiences in a technical sense, there was more than a fair share of comment about some of the screenplay ideas, notably the mineral term ‘Unobtainium’. Still, it made a great deal of money – and a lot of fans happy.
Eyebrows are certainly raised at the prospect of multiple sequels to AVATAR, but people are actually savouring the prospect of an official third TERMINATOR film with Cameron back on board after several other sequels didn’t quite reach the heights of the original two. In the meantime, we can appreciate the wonders of ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL.
If READY PLAYER ONE had not existed in either film or novel form, then this might well have been the perfect collaboration between Cameron and Steven Spielberg. Thematically, it is a movie that both talents have embraced in previous work, Cameron with the likes of TERMINATOR and AVATAR and Spielberg with his version of the Stanley Kubrick project, A.I (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE) which would have been Kubrick’s follow-up to EYES WIDE SHUT if he had lived past submission of final cut to Warner Brothers.
Based on a hugely popular Manga comic, Yukito Kirshiro’s GUNNM and – according to Jon Landau’s pre-media screening intro at the Cineworld IMAX in London’s Leicester Square at the end of January 2019 – a project in the works for two decades, ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the haves live above in an advanced raised city in the sky – and the have-nots live below. The junk from above gets thrown down onto the mega-tropolis and it is where Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) retrieves the upper half remains of a female cyborg, whom he takes home and gives various body parts. Functional, Ido names the cyborg Alita (beautifully rendered through the wonders of motion capture by Rosa Salazar) after his deceased daughter.
The world becomes a source of fascination for the newly living artificial, particularly when she encounters teens on the street who play a street version of the popular sport Motorball, where machines battle around a high-speed track with both the environment and each other. However, Alita’s fate is about to take on new meaning, particularly with entrepreneur Vector (Mahershala Ali) discovering that Alita has powers above and beyond what she was redesigned to do by Ido. In addtion, Ido’s ex Dr. Chiren (a cool and assured Jennifer Connelly) has concerns over Ido’s intent and purpose with Alita….
Thanks to Robert Rodriguez’s competent direction and some incredible visual effects that take the CGI realm to a new height, this is a truly cinematic experience that is a true communal experience with others, particularly in the wonders of modern IMAX. It also demonstrates that Cameron has found a way of heightening the characterisation through collaboration with other writings, in this particular case Greek-American scribe Laeta Kalogridis.
ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL does have a tendency on occasion to slip into sentiment, but a little bit of that didn’t harm mass entertainment. Salazar is a warm presence and a star in the making and the film does represent a creative return to form for Cameron, who might have given some of his more cynical fans hope for the new AVATAR sequels.
