I haven't read Yukito Kishiro's "Alita" manga, originally titled "Gun Dream," but I am a fan of the 1993 anime adaptation. The live action film, directed by Robert Rodriguez and scripted by James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, follows it pretty closely. Alita (Rosa Salazar) is discovered by the kindly Dr. Ido (Christoph Waltz) on a scrap heap, and he rebuilds and rehabilitates her. She falls in love with a young man named Hugo (Keean Johnson), who is desperate to go to Zalem, a city in the sky that is closed off to those below. Iron City is a dangerous place, full of crime, and policed only by "Hunter Killer" bounty hunters. Alita, however, is attracted by the danger and fighting, which may be related to her old, forgotten life.
The plot is kind of a mess, full of all sorts of outlandish elements like the Hunter Killers (I can't believe they kept that term), mad scientists, and an arena sport called Motorball. It doesn't all cohere together too well. However, I do enjoy a lot of the worldbuilding, including so many different cyborg characters who have replaced parts of their bodies with hardware. There are several memorable cyborg grotesques, created by placing actors' faces on CGI bodies, including villains Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley) and Zapan (Ed Skrein). Alita herself has gotten a lot of attention for her digitally enlarged anime eyes. I think the effect is executed very well, making Alita look otherworldly. And though initially a little distracting, I largely forgot about it after the first few minutes.
More importantly, many of the performances are good. Rosa Salazar gives Alita a lot of personality, selling her teenage recklessness, her battle lust, and her passionate idealism. I also really enjoy Christoph Waltz as fatherly Dr. Ido, and predict he's going to get plenty of offers for similar parts in the future. Unfortunately, the film doesn't do much with other members of the cast like Jennifer Connelly, playing a rival cyborg doctor, Chiren, or her boss Vector, played by Mahershala Ali. There's too much crammed into the movie to give all the characters their due. The worst victim of this is Hugo, who loses a good chunk of important backstory and doesn't come off well in this version at all. Alita seems to fall in love with him because he's literally the first boy she sees, and their relationship never really works.
Also a little lost in the shuffle is the whole dichotomy of Iron City and Zalem, which was central to the anime version. Iron City actually seems to be a pretty nice place to live, at least during daylight hours. Several characters desperately want to go to Zalem, but it's not clear why it's so much better. Neill Blomkamp's "Elysium" got across the concept of the elevated elites subjecting the masses below much more effectively. And though "Alita" keeps a lot of the imagery from the earlier version, it doesn't work so well without the original context. "Alita" is PG-13, and tones down a lot of content, to the point where one memorable death happens offscreen entirely. And for all the carnage of the cyborgs chopping each other to bits, the violence is mostly bloodless.
I'm hopeful that "Alita" gets the sequel that it has very obviously sets up, and we get to see more of her world. I prefer the animated version of this story, but the new movie is an interesting piece of work, for its effects and its concepts if nothing else. It's weird and ambitious and tries a lot of new things. Some of it's not very successful, but it's something different and promising. And that's more than I can say for most of this year's big studio blockbusters so far.
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