Typically I am not a fan of dystopias, mostly because that seems to be all modern sci-fi creators want to do anymore. When balanced with more utopian stories I think it’s just fine, but just as I don’t want all science fiction to be utopian I don’t want all science fiction to be dystopian. Each has their own thing to say or their own way to tell a fun story. However, Hollywood fears bright colors and sunlight…which is odd given they’re in California, which is loaded with both. Maybe they see it too often outside the windows of their mansions?
The fact that I was interested in Alita: Battle Angel is then something of a fluke, but given that my all-time favorite movie is in a genre I don’t typically follow AND is a poor adaptation of the source material stranger things have happened. I don’t know if Guillermo del Toro saw the original Battle Angel Alita manga by Yukito Kushiro or the original video animation by KSS Inc., Movic, Animate and famous (in the west) anime studio Madhouse. The story goes that he showed one of them (possibly even the novelization given Hollywood types and their lack of interest in anything with drawings nowadays) to James Cameron, who loved it. It took a few years for other projects to give him the opening, tapping Robert Rodriguez to direct. In 2019 the movie hit theaters…and the “fun” began.
I would be remiss not to discuss how the movie was drawn into the current internet arm of the culture war, which I swear has gone nuclear by now. When critics of Captain Marvel, the Bree Larson movie part of the MCU, were being called misogynists because they supposedly didn’t want to see a movie starring a woman Alita: Battle Angel was used as a counterpoint of how to tell the story with a female hero right. Instead of discuss the issue and try to learn from the perspective of others, a dying art on the internet, defenders of Captain Marvel decided to attack Alita, probably without actually watching any version of it because nuance is dead. I actually considered reviewing the two movies together but I’ve decided not to take part in that nonsense. It is not fair to either film and the people who worked hard on it to judge two unrelated movies based on each other. Heck, I don’t even do that for sequels. While not-Billy Batson is on the Finally Watched list (and Billy Batson in name only isn’t…sorry Shazam! but you shouldn’t have used Geoff Johns’ comic version as your guide) I’m going to review this movie based on its own merits.
RELEASE DATE: 2019
RELEASED BY: Twentieth Century Fox, Lightstorm Entertainment, and Troublemaker Studios
RUNTIME: 2 hour 2 minutes
RATING: PG-13
VIEWING SOURCE FOR THIS REVIEW: HBO2 during a free preview weekend
That’s a new category frankly I should have added long ago.
STARRING: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Keenan Johnson, Mahershala Ali, and Jennifer Connelly
SCREENWRITERS: James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis
DIRECTOR: Robert Rodriguez
BOX OFFICE: $404,980,543 worldwide, $85,838,210 domestic according to IMDB
ESTIMATED BUDGET: $170,000,000 according to IMDB
