Alita: Battle Angel Review

I finally watched Alita: Battle Angel in the cinema. As your average anime fan, I couldn’t pass this opportunity to see a manga translated to the big screen. I didn’t particularly have high expectations, given that even Japan rarely produce decent adaptations of their own comics. If the Japanese couldn’t, how the hell could Hollywood do it? I wondered. Yet somehow, Alita: Battle Angel didn’t turn into a complete disaster as most other manga/anime to live action do. How did the team pull it off? I actually might have a clue.

I first heard of Alita as this 2-decade old manga to film adaptation that James Cameron and Guillermo Del Toro wanted to produce for a long time. I knew they were manga fans, but what I didn’t know was their love for a manga that wasn’t a well-recognized mainstream title. Intrigued, I decided to read the first 20 chapters of the manga for myself. Honest thoughts: It wasn’t exactly the kind of series I thought that would translate to the big screen. There are many manga stories that I think can make it to Hollywood, without alienating a casual audience, but Gunnm, short for Gun Dream as it’s originally known in Japan, wasn’t exactly one of those.

The world of Gunnm takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, as is common with a lot of manga. General audiences are familiar with those nowadays. We follow the story of Alita (Gally in Japanese), a female cyborg who's been found in the junkyard of Scrap Iron City and repaired by Cyber Physician and Hunter Warrior, Ido. As expected, the story plays out in your typical teenage novel fashion. Ido takes her in as his own daughter, Alita falls in love with a boy and goes on a journey on finding her own identity. However, the big twist other than the fact that it's set in a post-apocalyptic future, it's that Alita is physically strong as hell, and can send legions of her enemies flying.

This is good and all. However, the manga has some serious flaws. Most notably, the violent scenes are shown in an overly cartoonish manner which make them hard to take seriously. Additionally, many of the cyborgs who roamed this dystopian world are comically oversized. It reminded me a lot of these futuristic anime OVAs that were produced for the latter half of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s. They’re fun, bombastic, but aren’t anything more. A good example of that is MD Geist. You need a bit of that edgelord in you to be able to revel in its glorious nihilism and a penchant for over the top gory non-stop action. This was my initial take of Gunnm. I didn’t think a cinema-going audience could accept those aspects of the series.

The narrative didn’t fare much better either, as events seemingly take place without much rhyme or reason. The author crams so much exposition between the pages, about the world; mostly on how the technology works. The bits of technical info are fascinating, but they don’t do much to pull me into the world. However, something did change during my reading and that was when I reached the Motorball chapters. Motorball is basically the in-universe fictional sport that the inhabitants love to watch and play. It’s brutal, fast, exhilarating, and it’s probably the most striking aspect of this manga.

When I finally had the chance to watch the movie, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the director, Rodriguez and his vision of the movie aligned closely with my own. He decided to focus on one of the best aspects of the manga, namely the motorball sport, while also quietly toning down the cartoonish violence of the manga which didn’t gel with Alita’s journey of self-discovery. Furthermore, some events that were without much care in the manga were given a much needed cinematographic treatment, adding much emotional weight to the overall story. For example, spoilers, the scene where the asshole villain Zapan shows up in the Hunter Warriors' bar to intimidate Alita is a lot more intense than the one we read in the manga. That's just one example, and there are many more.

Aesthetically speaking, Alita: Battle Angel was a beautifully rendered world with a striking and vibrant colour palette despite the grim setting that our characters find themselves into. Alita herself had those big and beautiful anime eyes that were sure to turn some eyeballs away, but it was done well enough which sent a message to the audience that Japanese comics are here to stay.

If I have one criticism, it’s that the movie does seem directionless in the first half, but that was also a problem in the manga. However, in the second half, just as you continue reading the manga, the pieces start fitting in, you get to know who the villains are, and you also get a glimpse of what Alita’s true purpose and goals are. To help the audience with that, the team also decided to pull material from later Alita manga that explored her backstory and integrated them into the movie, with great success.

Unfortunately, for run-time reasons, we never get to Zalem, the floating city in the sky that lower class inhabitants dream of going to. The movie like many other sprawling epics sets up a sequel that should continue the manga’s story, should the movie do well enough financially to warrant one. Personally, I’m well satisfied with what we got; which is a good adaptation of a manga. Alita is proof that with enough skill, any comic can be faithfully recreated successfully, without having to change much of its identity. What I watched in the cinema was undoubtedly not Hollywood’s Alita or Western Alita, but Alita. I straight up recognized the world, the characters, the designs, 2 minutes in, which is a testament to the actors’ no-nonsense performance. There were also no silly quips every minute like those mass-produced Marvel movies to mindlessly distract me. Instead, I was offered a fantastic and imaginative world to dive yourself into, that was more than the sum of its parts.

Adressing the controversy

Of course, no Alita review can feel complete without me at least mentioning the controversy surrounding the movie and Captain Marvel. The fans do make a solid point here. See that, Hollywood? It goes to show that you don't have to make man-hating jokes to push a feminist agenda forward. Ido is a great father figure to Alita, and Hugo shows that he cares deeply about her as well. They all complement her character rather well. She's strong, but that doesn't mean she has to ditch the men in her life. This is exactly what we need in Hollywood and less of the narcissistic men hating crap that's been circulating online these days. I have nothing against Captain Marvel, as a movie, but it is true that Hollywood these days seem more interested in artificially pushing a political agenda forward through their movies. Audiences since the dawn of time hate being preached to, and hence the backlash.

Conclusion

I can vouch for Alita: Battle Angel as one of the best manga to live action transitions, I've ever seen. Yet, the director Rodriguez achieved such a feat, without having to tinker the source material too much. All he did was take existing scenes and enhanced them in considerable ways. This, in turn, worked much better for the movie, earning the respect of both fans of the original manga and movie-goers alike, unlike the much-derided Dragonball Evolution.

---

Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://cryptotsuki.com/2019/03/09/alita-battle-angel-review/

---