- UK release: February 2019
- Director: Robert Rodriguez · Writers: James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis
- Studio / distributor: 20th Century Fox; Lightstorm Entertainment; Troublemaker Studios
- Genre: Cyberpunk science fiction action · Runtime: 122 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Source: Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro
- Main cast: Rosa Salazar (Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials) as Alita; Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained) as Dr Dyson Ido; Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind, Requiem for a Dream) as Chiren; Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, Hidden Figures) as Vector; Keean Johnson as Hugo
- IMDb: 7.3 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 61% critics / 92% audience · My rating: 9 / 10
This is the film James Cameron has been carrying around in his pocket since the late 1990s. He bought the rights to Yukito Kishiro’s cyberpunk manga, wrote and developed it for years, then handed the director’s chair to Robert Rodriguez so he could go and disappear into Pandora instead. On paper that is a worrying chain of custody: a passion project of one director, shot by another, adapted from a dense Japanese comic that most western audiences have never read. In practice it is the most sheerly entertaining science fiction adventure I have seen in a long while, and the gap between what the critics make of it and what everyone I know makes of it is wide enough to fall into.
The setup
Three hundred years after a catastrophe known only as the Fall, Dr Ido picks a discarded cyborg torso out of a scrapyard beneath the sky-city of Zalem and rebuilds her. She wakes with a new body, no memory, and the name Alita. Iron City is a grubby, vibrant sprawl of bounty hunters, cyborg street brawlers and a brutal contact sport called Motorball, all of it living off the rubbish that the privileged floating city drops on it from above. As Alita’s lost combat instincts surface, she begins to understand that her past is bound up with Zalem itself, and that the people running Iron City would rather she did not remember any of it. That is as far as I will go; the pleasure here is in the discovery.
The cast
Rosa Salazar is the whole gamble and she wins it. Alita is a fully performance-captured character with enlarged, deliberately not-quite-human eyes, and the worry going in is that you will spend two hours staring at an effect rather than a person. Within minutes that worry is gone. Salazar gives her a wide-eyed, tip-forward eagerness that is completely endearing without tipping into cloying, and when the fighting starts she switches into something coiled and lethal without losing the girl underneath. Christoph Waltz, an actor who can do menace in his sleep, plays Ido against type as a grieving, gentle surrogate father, and the warmth between him and Alita gives the film its spine. Jennifer Connelly brings a cool moral conflictedness to Chiren, and Mahershala Ali makes Vector a smooth, quietly dangerous power broker. Keean Johnson has the thankless human-love-interest role and does enough with it. The casting is loaded with more talent than this sort of film usually bothers to hire, and it shows.
The craft
Rodriguez has always been a maximalist, and here he has Cameron’s money and Cameron’s world-building behind him. Iron City is a genuinely lived-in place, layered and textured and grimy in the best way, shot by Bill Pope with real depth. The action is the standout: the bar brawl, the Motorball sequences, the night-time hunts all have a clarity and weight that so much modern blockbuster fighting lacks, and the cyborg combat lets the choreographers get inventive in ways human bodies cannot. Tom Holkenborg’s score drives it along without drowning it. There is a lot of plot crammed into 122 minutes, and the film does occasionally sprint where it should breathe, but the momentum carries you past the joins. The 3D, for once, is built into the image rather than smeared on afterwards.
How it stacks up
The obvious reference points are the great cyberpunk touchstones, and Alita knows it. There is Blade Runner in the vertical, rain-slick city of haves and have-nots, and a clear debt to Ghost in the Shell and the anime tradition the source manga helped shape. But this is warmer and more adventurous than either, less interested in melancholy and more in forward motion. It sits closer to Cameron’s own Aliens and Terminator 2 in its instinct for a propulsive, emotionally legible action story with a fierce young woman at the centre. Set it against last year’s Ready Player One, another effects-heavy plunge into a constructed world, and Alita has the better heart and the more convincing place.
Critics versus the rest of us
The split is stark. Critics are sitting around 61%, with the recurring complaint that the plot is overstuffed, that it spends its running time setting up a sequel it has not earned, and that the ending stops rather than concludes. Audiences are way out ahead at 92%, and a vocal, devoted fanbase has formed almost overnight. I am with the audiences, and I think the critics are marking it against a film it never set out to be. Yes, it plants seeds for more. Yes, it would happily have been twenty minutes longer. But it is generous, big-hearted, gorgeous to look at and genuinely exciting, and those are not small things to get right.
Verdict
I have watched this more times than is sensible and it holds up on every return, which for me is the real test. Salazar’s Alita is one of the most likeable protagonists in recent science fiction, the world is one I am happy to keep visiting, and the action still lands. It is not flawless. The plotting is busy and the romance is the weakest thread. None of that dents how much fun it is, or how much I want the sequel the ending is so plainly fishing for. This is audience-friendly cyberpunk done with craft, heart and confidence, and it is exactly my sort of film. 9⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in 3D on the biggest screen you can reach.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the sequel the ending so obviously set up has not yet materialised, though Cameron and Rodriguez have repeatedly said they want to make it, and the fan campaign to keep it alive has barely let up. The film has settled firmly into cult-favourite status, a textbook case of a movie loved far more by its audience than by the critics who first reviewed it. It is now widely available on disc, in 4K, and on digital, and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, bloody images, infrequent strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
The BBFC’s detailed Content Advice page for this release could not be retrieved at the time of writing, so the full category-by-category breakdown (Violence, Threat, Language and so on) is not reproduced here. The age rating and the short consumer advice line above are as issued by the BBFC. Broadly, the film carries frequent cyborg-on-cyborg combat with dismemberment and bloody images, scenes of threat, and one use of strong language.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk). Consumer advice line as published by the BBFC for this release.
