![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
We saw Alita: Battle Angel and It's Mostly About the SFX
Alita: Battle Angel is a western adaptation of a popular manga. As such, it's already treading on some very thin ice. Previous attempts to westernize manga have ... not gone well. This one avoids many of the bad pitfalls but ends up not being entirely satisfying. 3/5 stars for basic competence and yes I'd probably watch a sequel if one gets made.
Alita is a SFX tour-de-force, portraying a world of mixed machine/human bodies from grotesque prostheses up through full-on cyborgs. At some level you know it's animation and effects, and the film doesn't try to hide that. Instead, it wants to keep your attention with a combination of action and novelty, wrapped tightly around a self-discovery story.
Rosa Salazar plays Alita through a dizzying set of changes. One scene she's a disobedient fourteen-year-old girl; the next, she's a teen discovering a potentially mutual attraction with another teen. Not long after that, she's a fighting machine and then ultimately she goes (effectively overnight) from 14-15 to young woman. She's figuring out who she is, who her friends and enemies are, and how she will shape her place in the decaying decadent world she inhabits.
Given that it's manga you need to keep both hands firmly suspending your disbelief because... really? I mean... really? OK, no spoilers, but there's just a huge handful of things that make no sense even if you accept the movie's premises and context. Getting past that would be helped if more of the supporting cast were given better dialog. It almost feels like screenwriters James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis forget characters are in scenes at times. This is particularly painful in early scenes where Alita and Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) are talking. In the room is also Nurse Gerhad but she remains silent throughout the scenes. Idara Victor is reduced to nodding, waving, and looking concerned in places where you'd expect a normal person to have something to say. I was actually surprised when her character did speak; I half-believed she was intentionally mute.
Of the supporting cast, the only one I really liked was Vector, which is likely due in part to Luke Cage having turned me into a Mahershala Ali fan. Walz does a competent job but the problem is that he's initially set up to be the father figure of the naive Alita; the film doesn't seem to know what to do with him once she attains (effective) womanhood.
The film's other big problem is its unsatisfactory ending. In a manga, you expect the end of a story (volume) to be just a chapter in a long-running saga. Translating that onto film requires something more and this script falls short, I think. See this for the cool effects and snappy action and let's hope Rosa Salazar gets to shine more.
Alita is a SFX tour-de-force, portraying a world of mixed machine/human bodies from grotesque prostheses up through full-on cyborgs. At some level you know it's animation and effects, and the film doesn't try to hide that. Instead, it wants to keep your attention with a combination of action and novelty, wrapped tightly around a self-discovery story.
Rosa Salazar plays Alita through a dizzying set of changes. One scene she's a disobedient fourteen-year-old girl; the next, she's a teen discovering a potentially mutual attraction with another teen. Not long after that, she's a fighting machine and then ultimately she goes (effectively overnight) from 14-15 to young woman. She's figuring out who she is, who her friends and enemies are, and how she will shape her place in the decaying decadent world she inhabits.
Given that it's manga you need to keep both hands firmly suspending your disbelief because... really? I mean... really? OK, no spoilers, but there's just a huge handful of things that make no sense even if you accept the movie's premises and context. Getting past that would be helped if more of the supporting cast were given better dialog. It almost feels like screenwriters James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis forget characters are in scenes at times. This is particularly painful in early scenes where Alita and Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) are talking. In the room is also Nurse Gerhad but she remains silent throughout the scenes. Idara Victor is reduced to nodding, waving, and looking concerned in places where you'd expect a normal person to have something to say. I was actually surprised when her character did speak; I half-believed she was intentionally mute.
Of the supporting cast, the only one I really liked was Vector, which is likely due in part to Luke Cage having turned me into a Mahershala Ali fan. Walz does a competent job but the problem is that he's initially set up to be the father figure of the naive Alita; the film doesn't seem to know what to do with him once she attains (effective) womanhood.
The film's other big problem is its unsatisfactory ending. In a manga, you expect the end of a story (volume) to be just a chapter in a long-running saga. Translating that onto film requires something more and this script falls short, I think. See this for the cool effects and snappy action and let's hope Rosa Salazar gets to shine more.