No one told meAlita: Battle Angelwas a movie about rollerblading.
And were talking Xtreme Future Rollerblading.
Like, with actual sharp, limb-chopping blades.
Credit: Twentieth Century Fox
Like, the best players dont just wear rollerblades, theyarerollerblades.
Alita puts the Blade back in Rollerblade!!!
will be this reviews pull quote.
Think NASCAR plusMetal Slug, but you might only participate if youre a giant half-human butterfly knife.
Ali is suddenly everywhere, an Oscar nomination forGreen Book, spanningTrue Detectives decades.
InAlita, he wears sunglasses so large you wonder if hes trying to hide.
Hard to blame him.
Calling this movie junk does a disservice to the authenticity of trash.
ButAlitabegins in a scrapyard, where kindly cybersurgeon Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) discovers a ruined cyborg husk.
The droid bodys got a human brain and a heart full of antimatter.
Ido conducts some body-transplant surgery, and hey, presto, hes got a robo-teenager.
Who is Alita, really?
Where does she come from?
Its possible Salazar gives a good performance, and I hope to see it someday.
Whatever, really: There are Bravolebrities and middle-aged superheroes who look more plastic than Alita.
When she stares at herself in the mirror, the uncanny-valley strangeness is legitimately surreal.
The bigger issue: Youve seen this all before.Alitaderives from the 90s manga seriesGunnm, by Yukito Kishiro.
It makes sense that co-writer James Cameron sparked to the story.
Certain sequences simultaneously pay homage to Kishiros source material and Camerons own genre classics.
And then another main characteralsogets carved into a borgy head-torso.
Rated PG-13: Bring the kids!
The other co-writer is Laeta Kalogridis, creator of Netflixs future noirAltered Carbon.
In flashbacks, Alita recalls a spacesuited moon battle, and a frontal assault on a sky fortress.
The ruined worldscape swirls with mythic intrigue: legends of Martian onslaughtery, ancient skeletons in a crashed spaceship.
Here in the actual movie, Alita meets Hugo (Keann Johnson), a sweetheart skater punk.
He is a boy, she is a girl, can I make it anymore obvious?
Alita also runs afoul of some bounty hunters.
Heres a talented actress reduced, no joke, to spare parts.
I suspect Cameron dug the cyber-romance ofAlita.
To demonstrate her passion for Hugo, Alita pulls her antimatter heart right out of her exoskeletal chest.
Any chemistry at all between the bland young lovers would be cooler.
Cameron used to have a gift for sharp dialogue, and all the characters speak in faux-history annotations.
Advice for all sci-fi storytellers: The whole point of world building is showing us more than blueprints.
After developing this film for an eon, Cameronhanded off directorial duties to Robert Rodriguez.
This decade hes just taking resin hits off his fading IP, sequelizingSpy KidsandMacheteandSin City.
And too much ofAlitacouldve been shot by any yes-man hack traffic-copping any franchise extension.
Maybe cyberpunk is the new steampunk, a genre too nostalgically precious for its own good.
You smell the telltale fumes of reheated coolness.
So, she thinks she can punk me, eh?
says villainous Zapan (Ed Skrein), and now we know the word punk will survive the apocalypse.
But Rodriguezs camera comes to life during the Motorball scenes.
The big set-piece game spins off a blue-bloody track onto the highways and sewageways of Iron City.
At one point Ido exclaims, You have to keep your mind on the game, Alita!
which is my new favorite loudly bad Christoph Waltz line reading.
Away from the Motorball track, people talk and talk and talk about some great war.
And there is a Big Bad Guy who spends this movie teasing toward his central role the next movie.
A better version of this movie wouldve kept its mind on the game.
Better title:Rollerblade Runner.C
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