Alita: Battle Angel Brings The Salt

Originally, this was the second half of my previous Post about Alita: Battle Angel's promising box office numbers and the laughable response it's getting from Rotten Tomatoes' idiotic critics, the half where I talk about how Alita is apparently a sexualised character and look at a few articles making that case. The problem is, like everything I write, it got long, really long, so I figured it was a better idea to split the thing in half and post the two separate topics as two separate posts, so here is the half where I accuse a pair of women of projection while laughing at their articles, and since I'm such a goblin, and recently discovered how to crop the backgrounds out of pictures, I decided I'd give my header a bit more character.

Previously, I rambled about Alita: Battle Angel's moderate box office success and laughable critical response, while I, rather angrily, tried to make the point that there's a pompousness and idiocy to RT's critics, one that shines in the chasm between their views and the views of normal people. That's only part of the story though, another part is obviously ideology; critics having hard-ons for films that stroke their egos and confirm their biases. But I'd at least have thought that Alita: Battle Angel, who has, to use their terminology, a woman of colour in the lead role, would get a pass from them precisely because Alita is a woman of colour, never mind that she's actually a likable, fun, badass, vulnerable character as well. However, like Kisonak from Vermont in my last post, I never considered that a CG woman in a film having big tits would be a problem to people, something I feel kind of bad to admit because, in hindsight, it's so obvious, she's an empowered woman, but she's also beautiful, and obviously her being beautiful would be problematic to someone, somewhere. One such person is one Molly Freeman of Screenrant, whose article; "Alita Has A Design Problem (But It's Not The Big Eyes)" has been doing the rounds on a lot of anti-SJW YouTube channels. Since Alita: Battle Angel is my new favourite film, and since there are SJW types going after it, you know that I'll gladly take a stab at one such article, so let's get stabbing.

https://screenrant.com/alita-design-problem-big-eyes-body/

Our author doesn't waste any time with her introduction, getting to the root of the problem in the first sentence of her article. "But the film fails to compellingly explain why her android body conforms to a sexualized "ideal" body type." Our author then gives us a rundown of the film's events, one that includes a few too many details, so, spoilers, you've been warned, I'll be explaining why our author's wrong by talking in detail about the film, but here are the important parts, she finds a URM cyborg body, she gets ripped apart in her fight with Grewishka and Ido puts her back together using the URM cyborg body, something he promised that he wouldn't do. There is a lot going on with his decision to not connect her to that body in the film however, as Alita says, he knows more than he is telling her, and she, and the audience, eventually learns that she is a Berserker, an URM soldier from The Fall, and given that the URM ended the world, and Alita was an URM soldier, hooking her up to the most powerful and dangerous weapon on the planet wouldn't be a good idea. This also ties into his desire to shelter her; there's a lot of meaning in Ido connecting Alita's core to his dead daughter's body, maybe he wants to find peace over his daughter's death, maybe he can't bear to not have a daughter anymore, either way, he rebuilds Alita, gives her his daughter's name and body, and does as much as he can to keep her in the dark about who she really is, and connecting her to the URM body would destroy that for him. Of course, the opposite happens, Alita becomes the woman she is meant to become, and while Ido feared losing his daughter again, by the end of the film, she has embraced him as a father figure. This dynamic between Alita and Ido was one of my favourite things about the film, and Alita's transition isn't just into the Battle Angel, it's also into being the daughter Ido lost.

But like Kisonak, our author doesn't seem to see the meaning in that body, finding the film's explanation of said body's curves "eye-rollingly bad." Firstly, our author states that her sexy design is the product of the original Manga's visuals, which, to me, is a good enough reason on its own. There is nothing wrong with being faithful when adapting a story into a new medium, and as someone who loves Godzilla and has a Netflix account, I've had enough of people changing things for the sake of changing them. If Cameron and Rodriguez are as huge fans of the Manga as they claim to be, then the decision to recreate the visuals of the Manga makes complete sense, and that literally is all the reason you need for her design. Our author even recognises this in her article, talking about the effort that went into her eyes. But here we have the root of the root of the problem, and that's that our author doesn't respect Alita's agency. Now, obviously a fictional character does not, in a direct sense, have agency, a character's agency comes from the power they exert over the story and world that they inhabit, which is all within the mind of the storyteller, but in that regard, Alita has a lot of agency, she's gonna change the world in the sequel, or burn it down, one of the two. But here's where our author slips, she seems to think the explanation of it being how Alita thinks she should look is the film makers trying to cover their sixes because they knew the design would be problematic. It's here though that I have an issue with our author's stance on this design, how it changes from the URM shell to "the sexualised feminine body." This is classic SJW thinking, here, because our author has, fundamentally, confused the words sexy and sexualised, and considers them both to be negative attributes of a character's design. She makes the point that it's odd for a rebel like Alita to conform to how other people think of her, which isn't the case at all, it is literally Alita's mind informing the body on how to look. But this next bit is a gem; "it also doesn't make sense that any woman having the opportunity to transform their body into that of a warrior's would enlarge the breasts and trim the arms, waist and legs." Ha, bullshit.

Are you telling me, author, that if any woman was given the choice of having a masculine body or being sexy, they'd take the masculine body, I don't believe that, not for a single second. I'm no Jordan Peterson, I'm not a behavioural psychologist, but I don't need to be, I just need to walk into my local Boots or Superdrug to see that you're wrong on this. Cosmetics is a billion-dollar industry, one that is indulged in by far, far, far more women than men. Women wear makeup so much that occasionally there'll be a social media challenge where they don't, and that's the challenge, and even with endless social justice pressuring to let it grow, let it grow, plenty of women still shave. Plenty of the women I work with wear makeup to work, which makes no sense at all to me because it's a dusty, sweaty warehouse, but they do it. And lets be really real for a second, you say that if a woman was given the chance to have bigger tits or bigger guns, she wouldn't take the bigger tits, darling, boob jobs exist, and they're frighteningly popular, far more popular than they would be if you were right. And about your example of She-Ra as a warrior woman, ha, bullshit, again, She-Ra is a terrible example of what you're trying to say. She-Ra was once a warrior woman, then Netflix made a show about her and removed all of her feminine characteristics, Alita meanwhile has feminine characteristics, she is also a very feminine character, far more feminine than someone like Captain Marvel. Wonder Woman is another bad example because she too has a very feminine appearance, as well as a costume that accentuates her appearance, she's gorgeous, and it's ok that she is, a woman can be strong and still be a woman, unless you'd rather they all be like Netflix's She-Ra, rather they all look like boys, that is unless you think it's wrong to be feminine because boys are naturally better, you misogynist.

Usually I keep personal attacks to calling the authors I talk about morons and idiots and occasionally bigots if need be, but when a female character is problematic because she's sexy, it's usually worth the time to have a look at the author, because I shall now propose an explanation for this article's existence, Molly Freeman is jealous of Alita. I did some thinking about why a woman would find it a problem that another woman, a fictional one, even, is sexy, but it makes a lot of sense if our author, Molly Freeman, isn't much of a looker herself, and lo and behold, she isn't. That matters, but not as much as how she perceives herself and Alita, and since we can't see inside her head, we don't know how she sees herself, but she has given us her perception of Alita in this article, and she finds Alita's URM body to be thin with a small waist and big breasts, and that this conforms to a sexualised "Ideal" body type. Our author isn't specific on who's sexualising standard Alita is conforming to, and while that may seem insignificant, it, to me, looks like projection. Alita is conforming to what our author deems to be sexy, a standard that she doesn't think she meets herself, Alita is sexier than she is and that gets under her skin. And this is very clear in her little final paragraph, where she asserts that it's a disservice to Alita: Battle Angel's female viewers, how is it? how is a woman in a film being sexy a disservice to women in the real world, because it sets a beauty standard, oh no. The sad thing is that the beauty standard Alita conforms to is a very real and achievable standard, minus the eyes obviously, a slim, lean body with a nice rack and a thin waist isn't an impossible body type, hundreds of thousands of athletes, actresses, singers, models and health enthusiasts have builds like that, but Molly here doesn't, so she projects that insecurity about her own body, saying that it's an unfair and problematic standard that poisons girls' minds, only because it bothers her that she does not meet that standard herself. So at the end, when she projects that insecurity onto the masses by calling the film a disservice to women, that's all it is, an insecure woman projecting her jealousy and insecurity onto whatever she can, and trying to tell us that we should feel bad for liking a nice body, only because deep down, she doesn't like her own.

This Screenrant article is a joke, it reminds me of the good old days of 2012 to 2015, at the height of Feminist Frequency's infamy, when it was a problem that a video game character was too sexy, when it was a problem that Catwoman had a big ass, and when it wasn't a problem that someone who opens dislikes and is openly ignorant of video games was taken seriously as a critic of them.
https://news.sky.com/story/sky-views-hollywoods-sexualised-portrayal-of-young-women-has-to-stop-11628398
The weird thing is that this Screenrant article isn't the only one; there are more people complaining that Alita is sexualised, like one opinion piece from Sky News that, again, complains that Alita's design is "unnecessarily sexual." The same issues as the Screenrant article pop up here too; the "impossibly tiny" waist and big tits, and the author expresses confusion that a film made for a teen audience would make its female lead so sexualised and objectified, as if sex isn't a brilliant way to sell something to teens. But this author takes it a step further by saying that "cultural homage," as in being faithful to the Manga, isn't a good enough excuse, way to belittle Japanese culture you xenophobe. They then say, "We have simply got to stop portraying women and girls like this," like she's anyone to make such a drastic ultimatum, because, and this is amazing, "[she] would love Alita's body and costume to not be in the slightest bit important." This, coming from the one who's thankfully short opinion piece is all about how problematic her design is, very consistent, oh but we need to think of the children, because they might look at Alita and want to be like her, heaven forbid a young girl would have a badass cyborg superhero with a heart of gold as their role model, heaven forbid she aspires to be a hero like Alita.

But she's not done being an idiot, because apparently sexy women in film and TV gives impressionably people the idea that sexy women are objects and not people, wow, that's a sweeper, isn't it. It's an absurd thing to say, because, contrary to what our author seems to think, boys aren't mindless meat heads, teenage boys maybe meatheads, I know, I was one, but they too have brains that they can use to discern an object from a human, and I, frankly, find it deeply sexist that you'd even imply that we men have no ability to recognise the humanity of sexy women, like we're all your misandristic bogeyman of  sexist, mansplaining, cat-calling, sexually harassing, rape-apologist scum. But here's the fun part, well, the other fun part, apparently it's not enough to empower them through the narrative, which really shows how fucking sad you are, author, because it'll never be enough, nothing will ever be enough, you have a girl who is literally unstoppable, who is the deadliest weapon in the world, but who is also principled and morally righteous, but that isn't good enough because she's sexy, and sexy is bad, probably because, like poor Molly, you aren't all that sexy yourself, and feel insecure and jealous of a CG cyborg girl because she's prettier and cooler than you. Cameron and Rodriguez should have known better, eh? and, again, who are you to say anything like that, who are you to make moral judgements about how entertainment should be. Tell me, if you were given the power to stop them from designing Alita the way they did, would you have done it? because if you had, you're exactly the wrong person to have that power, that'd be a very scary power to want, because you don't get to decide what other people make, like and watch based on your delicate sensibilities, no matter how controlling and zealous you are.


Some things just never change
I get the feeling that in a few weeks, Alita: Battle Angel will be getting compared to Captain Marvel a lot, and I'll probably be one of the people making the comparison, because I'm sure it'll be a much more feminist friendly film. But one thing is for certain, Alita: Battle Angel is the film that countless SJW's want Captain Marvel to be; an empowering, meaningful film about a badass woman, but as ever, it isn't enough to be just that, it can't challenge their narrative or insecurities, and unfortunately for Alita, she does, because she's sexy and displays vulnerability. There's another thing that Alita has on her side, and that's that she's a complete darling, she's adorable and innocent, something Captain Marvel, no matter how good the film ends up being, will never be, and it's something that the people currently complaining about her design will never allow themselves to appreciate in the way that they really should, and that sucks for them.

Alita: Battle Angel Saves the Day, kind of

If you haven't read my review of Alita: Battle Angel, one; why are you so mean, and two; in that review I made the point that the film made the mistake of promising a sequel, since American adaptations of Manga and Anime very rarely do well, see the example of Ghost in the Shell, which opened in third on its opening weekend and grossed an abysmal $40 million domestic, despite, I felt, being a solid adaptation of the Anime, or at least a very visually faithful one with a bit of added popcorn value. That film also got one hell of a beating critically, with an RT critic score of forty three percent. Now, I give Rotten Tomatoes a lot of shit, and I will be today as well, but to be fair, the audience score isn't much higher, sitting at just fifty one percent, so clearly Ghost in the Shell did not land for audiences, because no one went to see it and the ones that did were split as to whether it was any good. Ghost in the Shell had another problem around its release too, that being the controversy surrounding Scarlett Johansson's casting in the lead role, which a lot of idiots thought was problematic because whitewashing and representation and buzzword buzzword buzzword. I've talked at length about the concept of whitewashing and how I think it's bullshit; a non issue propagated by progressives with no real love or understanding for the film industry. It occurred to me while writing my review for Alita: Battle Angel that maybe the film escaped any widespread whitewashing allegations because the lead actress; Rosa Salazar, isn't white, never mind then that she wasn't Latin in the Manga either, which technically makes this brownwashing, but since when have progressives been principled. As it turns out though, Alita: Battle Angel hasn't managed to escape the ire of the Progressives after all, what a surprise, but more importantly than that, it's doing something Ghost in the Shell never did, and that's do well at the box office, or at least wellish. But what exactly does that mean for the film, and for Anime and Manga adaptations in general, and will Alita: Battle Angel get the sequel I and so many others think it deserves but will never get, we shall see.

Let's begin with the film's box office numbers, which are far higher than I was expecting them to be. The film opened in first place on its opening weekend, dethroning The Lego Movie 2, which sounds really good, doesn't it, but when you look at actual numbers, the situation gets more complicated. The Lego Movie opened at number one in 2014 with an opening weekend gross of $69 million, which are some pretty solid numbers, the sequel however, while still opening in first, only grossed $34 million, half of what the first film did. I don't know why The Lego Movie 2 grossed so little in its opening, but I do know that this is consistent with the franchise's financial downward trend, being $14 million higher than The Lego Ninjago Movie's rather sad $20 million opening, and $19 million shy of The Lego Batman Movie's $53 million, which, itself, was $16 million shy of The Lego Movie's opening, that's a lot of numbers. When going up against an underperformer like The Lego Movie 2, you'd think a film with James Cameron's name on literally all of the marketing would be a killer, but despite being "From the Producers of Avatar and Titanic," the film was expected to come in at $25 million in its opening week, putting it in the same camp as Ghost in the Shell, which flopped, and also cost a lot less money to make than Alita: Battle Angel. The film has exceeded those predictions however, though not by much, taking its opening weekend's top spot with $33 million. For perspective, this time last year, Black Panther was crushing the box office with a $200 million opening, yet on the same holiday weekend, one year later, the number one spot isn't even making a sixth of that, woof.

So Alita: Battle Angel isn't hitting Black Panther numbers, that's not exactly comparing apples to apples though, with Alita: Battle Angel lacking the built in audience and supposed cultural significance of Black Panther, especially when you consider that Black Panther wasn't tracking to be such a hit and was in fact an overperformer. I have talked in the past about Anime and Manga's audience, specially about how the size of that audience was a factor in the failure of Ghost in the Shell, and that's simply because Anime and Manga, while adored by the fans, doesn't have the same massive appeal was something like Marvel or DC. Its built-in audience is far smaller, making adaptations of them in the west a much bigger risk for studios, because there is no Anime adaptation equivalent of Iron Man or Spider-Man; no film has broken that audience and cultural barrier and gone big in the way that many of the Marvel films of the 2000's did. Does the fact that Alita: Battle Angel exceeded expectations mean that said barrier has been broken, and that films like Ghost in the Shell will finally have mass appeal in the west, I still doubt that as one moderate success doesn't indicate a trend, nor would Detective Pikachu releasing and grossing a shit tillion dollars, as Pokémon is a different beast entirely. What this means right now is that Alita: Battle Angel has found an audience, people want more Alita: Battle Angel and that extra $10 million at the opening, while far from mind blowing, is a testament to that.

There is a problem though, and that is competition; Alita: Battle Angel might have taken the crown in its first week, but a $34 million opening still isn't massive, and it'll be facing some serious competition come the release of Captain Marvel, which is still expected to open to $80 million dollars despite its lead star being a detestable egomaniac with the expressiveness of a table. Even with the controversy swelling around Captain Marvel and its increasingly unambiguous feminist agenda, the film will still at least do ok, it could come in under $50 million, a disaster by MCU standards, or it could come in with Wonder Woman numbers, $100 million or higher, either way, it'll be curtains for Alita: Battle Angel. That's also assuming it manages to keep up with How To Train Your Dragon 3, which is projected to gross $40 on its opening weekend. This is the primary reason I still worry for the future of Alita on screen, because while it's top dog now, it's king of a very small hill, and there are some big hitters on the way, films that'll crush Alita: Battle Angel with ease. That being said however, Bumblebee, my favourite film of 2018, opened with a pathetic $21 million, and is, in no uncertain terms, a domestic flop, but found a stronger footing internationally, carrying it to a few million shy of half a billion dollars worldwide. Alita: Battle Angel's fate will probably be very similar, middling domestic numbers, but saved from being a flop by international success, something already observable in its box office numbers; grossing almost twice as much internationally as it has domestically, the film also has yet to be released in China and Japan as of me writing this, two countries where its chances of being successful are pretty good. So for once, A Manga adaptation might actually get a sequel, which would be awesome because Alita: Battle Angel is awesome, seriously, that thing's happening again, I'm getting obsessed.

Alita: Battle Angel is in a tight spot, it's grossed higher than expected and has yet to be released in one of the largest cinema markets in the world, but Stateside, it's time in the top spot will be very brief, what with How To Train Your Dragon 3 and Captain Marvel on the horizon. The film might end up making sequel numbers yet, we'll know in time. But now it's time to stop talking numbers and start looking into the other topic of the day, the more fun topic, Alita: Battle Angel pissing off the SJW's and the critics. Unlike Ghost in the Shell, Alita: Battle Angel's RT audience score is good, very good, even, sitting at ninety four percent, which is a damn solid number, unlike its critic score, which sits at just fifty nine percent. Once again, there is a noticeable disparity between the RT audience and critic score, and while its usually the critics raving while the audience aren't fans, like Venom, Alita: Battle Angel is reversed, audiences love it while the critics hate it. What's weird however is what the critics are saying, or rather what they think they're saying, you'll understand in a sec. One top critic for example, one Joe Morgenstern of the WSJ apparently "[can't] get past the film's brain." I'm not a WSJ subscriber so I can't read the full review, but I'll take a guess that he finds the film to be inconsistently and poorly written, it's the wording of the comment that I find odd though, "-the film's brain." A lot of critics also talk negatively about the film's mystery, with one comparing it to a homework assignment, as if it wasn't Cameron and Rodriguez's idea to leave a load of unanswered questions. You could go and do the homework, read through all the volumes of the original Manga, which is something I myself might actually do, but why not enjoy the mystery too, mystery is a great way of building a world, and Alita: Battle Angel does that really well. If you already had all the answers in the first film, why would you need a sequel, but Alita: Battle Angel makes you need that sequel through its very controlled delivery of answers, and its blatant sequel set up ending, but that's not the point.

One review stood out to me though, and that was by one Rick Kisonak of Seven Days, a newspaper from Vermont, who gave the film one star out of five in his review titled; "There's nothing new under the dystopian steampunk sun in 'Alita: Battle Angel'." As usual, it's better that you take that link and read the full review, because I won't be addressing all of the points in it and it's better if you have the other side of this rebuttal so that you, you know, understand what's going on.
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/alita-battle-angel/Content?oid=25960899
There's a little problem with this review right out the gate, and that's the author's referring to the film as steampunk in his title, which is such a massive oversight in his view of the film that I question if I'm even reading it right, because Alita: Battle Angel is not steampunk. Alita: Battle Angel is set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic far future where society has broken down, where the law is enforced by cyborg bounty hunters instead of police, and where a massive number of the population have augmented themselves with cybernetic parts, it is, completely and unapologetically, cyberpunk. This oversight is a bit more serious than you'd think because it comes from someone who hated the film, and shows, in painful clarity, that he didn't understand it, that he doesn't even know what genre it is when it is telegraphed so loudly that the URM can hear it. Our author really isn't off to a good start in his review, he's dropped the ball in his title, god only knows what the rest of the review contains.

Our author then does something I genuinely didn't expect, he compared the film, Alita: Battle Angel to the First World War, quoting some pointless philosophy as if it's at all applicable to this film, which he seems to think it is. His comparing this film to WWI however is, frankly, fucking ridiculous, seriously, what on Earth is he talking about. His point is that Alita: Battle Angel and the war are the same in that they're pointless, which I'm sure sounds very smart to him, and doesn't at all make him look like a tool, and as with our moron who hated Ghostbusters last time, this moron is free to dislike the movie, he's even free to nonsensically compare a Cyberpunk film based on a Manga to WWI, but he's wrong, he's wrong that Alita: Battle Angel is devoid of meaning, he's also factually wrong about the film itself, because he seems to think that Iron City's population also includes robots, which, like the film apparently being Steampunk, demonstrates that he has no idea what he's talking about. Iron City's population is not a mix of human and robot, nor is Zalem a District 9 or Elysium ripoff, given that the Manga Alita: Battle Angel based on predates both of those films by twenty years, and this idiot also doesn't remember that for the entirety of the film we only see the underside of Zalem, so his assessment that Zalem is a Nostromo ripoff too is wrong, as is his assessment that people would only want to live there because it's the future, because, again, we never see Zalem up close, life on Zalem is something we do not see, which is deliberately the case.

Like I said in my review of the film, Zalem is portrayed as a heavenly, unobtainable paradise, a place beyond the reach and even the comprehension of the lower classes down in Iron City, and we, the audience, know as much about the place as the characters in the film, which is to say we know nothing, that's the point. I Struggle to comprehend his next remark about Alita being a cartoon, I honestly can't believe someone would miss the point of a film's main character like this guy does, his comment that the URM body she gets later in the film has bigger tits is true, but what's also true is that this reflects a transition in her character, as does her change in clothes, something our moronic author clearly missed, kind of like how the film isn't Steampunk, god, my head is starting to hurt. I'm starting to get a vibe from this guy, because he then references an artist, which at least makes a bit more sense than his referring to a French philosopher, given the context, but I get the distinct impression that this guy thinks he's clever, that he thinks comparing the film to WWI and quoting a philosopher makes him a smart boi, but unfortunately you can't be a smart boi if you're a moron. It's rather fitting that he uses the phrase "appallingly dumb," to describe the film, because his review is appallingly dumb; he compares a film to WWI and quotes philosophy like that means a damn thing, like it excuses his confusing of Steampunk and Cyberpunk, his referring to possibly the best fully CG character ever put to screen as a cartoon, and his missing the point of the bigger tits. I also find it insane that he'd think Alita: Battle Angel is ripping off Elysium when it's twenty years older than Elysium, he does mention that the film is based on a Manga, but that doesn't negate his clear absence of understanding of said Manga, or of how time works, or of how Steampunk and Cyberpunk are different, I don't have time for this, fuck it.


Moral of the Story: Go Watch Alita: Battle Angel!
Got a bit heated from that review, but what can I say, I like cinema and I love Alita: Battle Angel, so a review from an idiot who thinks Steampunk and Cyberpunk are the same thing is going to piss me off a little. There's a pompousness to film critics on Rotten Tomatoes that I cannot stand, and it's getting more and more apparent every day, but what's also becoming more apparent is that no one gives a shit what they have to say, not when a film like Venom makes $850 million, and not when Alita: Battle Angel finds the audience that it really deserves, despite them not being able to get past its brain, whatever the fuck that means. Do you know what pisses me off more though, in a twisted, sadomasochistic sort of way, SJW's, and originally, this post was going to feature a pair of them, individuals who find Alita's design Problematic, but this would have been a stupidly long post, so it's getting its own post. But the moral of today is simple, don't listen to RT critics, and go see Alita: Battle Angel, it's a film that deserves the sequel it still might not get, but it's a great film and it deserves your money, so for the love of god, go see it.

Alita: Battle Angel movie review

Here's what you need to know; born into the cyberpunk dystopia of Iron City, Alita longs to know the truth about her past, who or what she is. But while searching for that truth, she finds herself in the sights of a sinister and mysterious puppet master, one who knows the truth about what she is and would rather she never knew, because Alita isn't a normal girl, she's the most dangerous weapon on Earth.
Above all else, I'm surprised that this film hasn't been given its lashings for the hideous crime of whitewashing, I mean, it's an adaptation of a Manga, which is Japanese, and yet the film isn't very Japanese at all, so where is the backlash this time. You know that I'm taking the piss, the whole idea of whitewashing is something I've always found rather pathetic, and while the striking visuals and cyberpunk setting gave me some real Ghost in the Shell vibes, I actually really liked the way Alita: Battle Angel looked, then I saw that Odeon were giving away exclusive promotional material on the film's opening weekend, and I was sold. That promo poster has, in fact, taken the place of my framed IT promo poster, but does that reflect the film's quality, or do I just really like film promo material, let's find out.

Alita: Battle Angel grabs you right out of the gate with its presentation, usually I talk about characters and story first, but it has to be said, this is probably the best CGI I've ever seen. The setting of Iron City is wonderfully brought to life with a beautiful blending of practical and computer effects, and an attention to detail that rivals the visual fidelity of Avatar. Very much like the setting of Ghost in the Shell, Iron City is a beautifully realised world, one that's believable and lived-in, with old world ruins scattered about below a massive flying city, and reminders of what people in this film call "The Fall," an apocalyptic war that left the Earth in ruins. You also don't get much of a look at that flying city, which I feel really adds to both the mystery and inaccessibility of the place, as well as the reality of the city below, as if Zalem (the flying city) is some kind of mythical, heavenly place, one that literally hangs over the consciousnesses of everyone in Iron City. So the film has gorgeous scenery, but none of that matters if the star of the show has doll eyes, right? But once again, the CG in this film is insane, and in particular, the CG used on Alita's face is Grand Moff Tarkin levels of good, it took some adjusting to seeing a woman with eyes as big as oranges, but once I did, I had no trouble at all believing that I was looking at a real human face, it was weird, but in a very good way. And, like Ghost in the Shell before it, Alita: Battle Angel goes nuts with the Cyberpunk; with most of the people of Iron City walking around with cyborg limbs, and a bar full of cyborg bounty hunters, one of which being Francis from Deadpool, or rather, his shit eating face on a robot body. The film's visual effects team really had fun with the film's presentation and design, and it is gorgeous to look at from beginning to end.

Ok, now we can talk about characters and story, and where the film's visuals and storytelling work very well together. Let's start with Alita, who is absolutely adorable; from her very first scene, to her first interaction with Ido, to going outside and seeing Iron City for the first time, it's just so sweet, and the film completely nails getting you to like Alita. It's here where her eyes become an important piece of visual storytelling; as Alita has no idea who, what or where she is, and is seeing everything for the first time, she is innocent, completely and incorruptibly so, and has trouble understanding the world for the dangerous and misleading place that it is, which is reflected in her design. Her big eyes reflect the child-like innocence of her mentality, as well as reflecting the notion that the eyes are the window to the soul, which Alita has in abundance thanks to her SpongeBob levels of optimism and innocence. But it doesn't stop there as later in the film, when she gets her hands on a new, more powerful robot body, that body takes on more mature feminine features, reflecting her development and growth from sweet, innocent girl to a more mature woman. Alita really is the heart and soul of the film, she is intolerably cute; a ray of light on a dark, dystopian world, and being the meanest weapon in the world and not even knowing it, she is a badass. There is a lot of mystery to her character; you learn a lot about her, but even more things about her and the world are left unexplained, which makes me hope that this film doesn't flop, because Alita and her world are things I'm dying to know more about, but what you do get is very intriguing, and it's something that I'm not going to spoil. There is a risk when making a character that's practically unstoppable, especially a female character; but what stops Alita from falling eyes first into Mary Sue territory is her emotional journey, as she starts out as an innocent, playful and adventurous spirit, before slowly realising that she has far more power than she thought, and that with that power, and this is the important bit, comes responsibility. At that point it's less about who and what she is, and more about how she fits into the world around her, what she does with the power she has.

I know this will piss a few people off, but she's basically a better version of Wonder Woman; an unstoppable tank with a warrior's spirit but a childish and simplistic outlook, whose ark becomes learning the ugly truth about the world around her and learning to accept that truth, only this is cooler, because Cyberpunk. And like Wonder Woman, Alita gets a love interest, and here's where the tables turn, because this guy is no Chris Pine. I get what they wanted to do with this character, and on paper, it works very well as Hugo is effectively Alita's introduction to the real world, with all its beauty and all its horrors. The pair have some really good scenes together too, like when Alita tries Chocolate for the first time or when he introduces her to Motorball, but when the film tries to show that they love each other, it felt less that they were in love, and more that a young, dumb girl was in love with a pretty boy. There is an emotional conflict that Hugo faces, that being his love for Alita and his under the table dealings with the film's villain, the issue is that I just never bought that he was in love with Alita, it was a bit cheesy, just a bit. What I had a much easier time buying was Alita's relationship with Ido, the doctor who rebuilds her. Without going into spoilers, Ido's motives for rebuilding Alita are pretty heavy, and those motives blossom into an adorable father-daughter relationship, only one with the added spice of the father being a badass bounty hunter and the daughter being a cyborg super-weapon. Ido's desire to protect and shelter Alita is one of the film's most human elements, and I loved the relationship the two of them had, far, far more so than Alita's and Hugo's mutual crush. Then there's the film's villain, Vector, who is just one of Nova's puppets. This is one of the areas where the film really slips in my opinion, because Vector isn't a very threatening villain at all in this film, despite being a shady, sinister, black glasses wearing villain, the film's efforts to set up a sequel completely undermines any villainous presence that he has because he is constantly overshadowed by a bigger fish, this film has a puppet master, one who never speaks and who you don't see until the very end, and for all the build-up Vector gets, he's nothing more than a puppet in the end, and that's kind of weak.

Something that Alita: Battle Angel does unbelievably well, as I've already said, is worldbuilding; with a beautifully realised dystopia filled to the brim with little details and some of the best CG ever produced. But this isn't just apparent in the beauty of Iron City and Alita's face, in fact it's most apparent in the film's action sequences, oh boy. Alita's action sequences are crazy, and awesome. And there's a few on offer in this film, including a pretty sweet bar fight, a completely badass Motorball sequence that was way cooler than I thought it would be, and a few throw downs with this big cyborg mother fucker that were also super cool. One good thing about everyone in the film being a cyborg is that the film can be as violent as it wants and not have to worry about all the blood, and holy shit this film is violent; People are getting decapitated, ripped and sliced limb from limb, blown up, crushed, stabbed, but it's all BBFC friendly because the blood is blue. That makes the handful of scenes when the blood isn't blue rather extreme in comparison, especially for a 12A, but you know me, when have I ever complained about a film being too violent, I complain when it isn't violent enough. The film's action sequences are an interesting thing in this film, as they should be, they're all fast, violent clashes of metal, but they're all very exciting and fun, there's just one problem. You'd expect a film like this to have some kind of epic final showdown to end the film on an epic note, but it doesn't and in that regard, the film's ending is a little anticlimactic. There's the awesome Motorball sequence, but then the film winds down for some reason, giving us a brief fight with a room full of spider tanks that was over way too soon, and an even briefer final fight with the big guy. The film's ending really doesn't do it any favours, setting up a sequel that, if the track record of American Manga and Anime adaptations is anything to go by, will probably never happen. It does kind of suck that the film made the decision to not only set up a sequel, but promise one by deliberately leaving its story open at the end. Alita: Battle Angel's ending would make me excited for a sequel if I had any confidence that a sequel was coming, but I don't and so the film just feels incomplete in its finale which, for some reason, features a time jump, and doesn't provide any substantial emotional payoff, just a promise that next time will be awesome, a next time that we'll be very, very lucky if we get the chance to see.


It's the loneliest feeling, not to know who you are
Alita: Battle Angel is, you guessed it, not a perfect movie, in fact it's very far from perfect, it gets a lot of things wrong, like its main villain and romantic subplot, not to mention its anticlimactic and unsatisfying ending that will probably never get the payoff it needs. But here's the thing, I loved this film, I can look past even its most glaring issues because at the end of the day, I love Iron City, I love the film's visual effects, I love its action sequences, and I adore Alita. She makes the film, her character and her relationship with Ido, and the mystery of what she is that gradually unfolds over the course of the film. A film can be flawed, a film can make mistakes, but at the end of the day, if the film is fun, and if it has the feels, I'll probably like it, and Alita: Battle Angel nails both of them. I cannot wait to watch it again, and it's definitely worth watching.