Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

Written by Gimly on February 26, 2019

I did enjoy Alita. It was a great big "pkyew-pkyew" sort of a mess, but I did still walk away having had a pretty good time.

Unfortunately, both Alita(the character)'s romantic interest and Alita(the movie)'s romantic plotline I despised. And this aspect took up so much on screen realestate that I could never see my way to giving Alita a glowing score, even if everything else about it had been perfect (it wasn't).

An interesting part of the flim though that I also need to touch on is the special effects. They aren't even close to photorealism, but it honestly still totally works, just because there are so many of them. Impressive is the most appropriate word that comes to mind. See, even if the CGI effects don't always sell themselves as reality, the world that they are in fits, it's like how an animated movie doesn't look like real life, but you're still convinced because against its own backdrop, even though maybe they didn't use an actual elephant to play the role of Dumbo, you still believe that he's a real character in that world. Alita's sheer abundance of creative, setting driven CGI, blurs the lines between live action and animation, delivering a totally new, unique product.

It's just a shame they couldn't have done that in a better, more coheseive (and less bogged down) narrative.

Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole.