Alita: Battle Angel Is Good If You Watch It on Mute
If ever was a day when you wondered (for some reason) if white male mediocrity in Hollywood is still celebrated, look no further than Alita: Battle Angel and James Cameron's writing.
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It's like they spent so much time making the movie look beautiful and those fight scene animations incredible, that they forgot that they needed speaking dialogue for the plot and then Cameron (and Laeta Kalogridis) hurriedly scribbled some basic-bitch words on paper. What is this.
Cinematography and Directing: Cool beans. Robert Rodriguez is a master of the action sequence, the fight scenes are mesmerizing, hard-hitting, and just a joy to watch, and this is coming from someone who would generally be happy to _skip_ the blockbuster action sequence in all movies if she could.
Plot: 80% predictable; agonizingly slow at times and unrealistically fast in others, but passable as a basic plot MAYBE.
Dialogue: 95% dumpster fire, 5% cool.
I promise you that if you watch this film entirely on mute and without subtitles, you'll not just understand everything that happened, but you'll enjoy the movie. The number of times I raised my palm to the screen to ask a character to calm down, Karen.
The actors did what they could with what they had, and they did a pretty damn good job at that, even the animated Alita was fun to watch despite the mishmash she had to say (and despite unrealistically being designed to look a little sexier than a teenage fighting robot should).
All plot points were addressed extremely superficially but also very... slowly for some reason? How does this movie drag on so much?
Because I feel like my frustration at the movie's screenplay renders me unable to present a coherent and intelligently-worded movie review, I'm going to include here bits and pieces that encapsulate my feelings about the movie succinctly.
“Alita: Battle Angel sheds (or ignores?) any need for coherence anywhere except in what’s projected up on the screen, and actually benefits from that commitment to action.”
“Co-writer/producer James Cameron and director Robert Rodriguez team up to adapt the Japanese manga series, and the results are what one might expect from two nerd gods of filmmaking: a visually stunning computer-generated heroine, impressive futuristic world-building, and some seriously neat action scenes. But for all its whiz-bang goodness, “Alita” (★★½ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters nationwide Thursday) is almost completely undone by its flawed script. The storytelling seems way more interested in setting up future installments than perfecting its own plot, and hackneyed lines like “She has the face of an angel and a body built for battle” belong in a 1930s noir – or a more macho Cameron flick – rather than what could have been a fantastic female-empowerment tale. ”
“’Alita: Battle Angel’ Review: Do Female Cyborgs Dream of Breasts?” (This headline alone, *chef’s kiss*)
”A pileup of clichés in service to technological whiz-bangery...”
Oh, and why the fork are movies still getting released in 3D? I spent two hours battling a splitting headache that I just abandoned the glasses in the last act to watch the film a little blurry. It wasn't even cool 3D. I didn't get kicked by the screen action ONCE.
