By: Grt

if you are a spoilerman consider yourself warned. But, before you go, here’s a spoiler for you: This movie fucking sucks.

I often hear Armchair critics (read: me) like to say the WRITING blah or the DIRECTING blah and that mostly rubs me the wrong way because I am
not enough of an expert in how movies are written or directed to even appropriately understand what that means, but it’s maybe a little more warranted in this particular trash’s case because there some nice things about this movie-

• The setting is cool. The set dressing is the FINEST space western style available: Shitty dust covered mixed familiar and unfamiliar technology, half busted floating cities, giant piles of garbage – goggles everywhere, The robot characters are covered in intricate inlay and look great. Even with their weird face heads

• The action choreography is very good. The too-fast moves of the robots, (surprisingly good) CG everything long shots – no jump cuts. Everything in a fight is well lit, and easy to follow. The moves are stylish-dope
• The individual performances are fine. Christof Waltz does great delivery on his weird-ass lines. Mahershala Ali mostly just twirls his mustache buthe does it well. Connelly is a weirdo and Alita is appropriately charming even with her borderline uncanny valley face.
• Guillotine centric stories ( this is one of them ) are my favorite, and exactly what I want to see in the year of our lord 2019.

However, These things just make me mad by the time we’re out of the theater. I want to like this movie, but the fancy wine of style and action are being used as Au Jus for the gas station egg salad sandwich of how this film comes together

I think this movie was meant to be 6 times longer than what we ended up with. I know the source material at least includes a movie, but anime production is often very complicated and I am sitting in an American theater in 2019, which very far from a basement in the 90’s. Though, on that subject, Have you have ever watched OVA ANIME on dvd releases and the pacing is unwatchable? That is (in my own opinion) because it is 24eps x 25 minutes (600) of content put on a 90 minute VHS length movie. This is way worse, but there is no underlying TV-length source to justify it. It is possible the 12 hour version of this movie slaps. The scenes come across like a laundry list of things to get us from a to a pretty strange b.

• A – Alita is garbage
• weird sex stuff?
• Waltz says something awkward
• weird sex stuff!?
• rollerblades
• VERY LONG UPGRADE SIDE PLOT ( though the fight is cool )
• amnesia?
• ESPECIALLY WEIRD SEX STUFF!?!?
• Murderball ( it is not called murderball in the movie )
• bf dies twist
• bf un-dies twist
• bf dies for real
• (six months later)
• B – Alita is Jesus

Perhaps (probably) I am just a hopeless pervert, but there is quite a lot of stuff about Alita’s cyborg body FEELING, and it comes across as weird and sexual. The ambiguity of how old she’s supposed to be (don’t you ‘sheisa300yearoldlol’ me on this one. I won’t have it.) makes it even weirder and grosser. I felt like I needed to spend at least half of this movie waving my de-sexing stick at it [click here to understand this joke] 

The movie is simultaneously infantilizing and sexualizing Alita – I suppose this is a problem in culture more wildly but has this one has got it bad.
I feel like we’ve had a lot of these incidents in James Cameron’s movies of the last decade. So I’m formally calling for us to suspend his sex license.
Neighbor has spent too much time in a submarine.

Furthermore, she has a full on mermaid problem and that makes it even weirder again.

ALITA BATTLE ANGEL:

ME:

How the stakes play out in this movie is not effective. It’s hard to tell what the characters are capable of and what the consequences are going to be, and it really sucks the air out of what are some very visually stunning fight scenes. The bad offenders are a weird body-upgrade side plot (serving primarily weird sex stuff and one rad punch) and her boyfriend dying coming back as a robocop and then immediately dying again. I don’t even know why they do this, but it might have something to do with Jennifer Connely’s brain in a jar? It’s all very confusing. All of these things could have weight, but I feel like the movie glosses over them, and I’m not sure what to make room for, except weird sex stuff, murder ball and robot cowboys.

There is robot cowboy with an important role in one scene. he is not in any other scenes. It’s not like I need every character in every scene, but like. what are we making room for?

I don’t want or need a whole lot of explanation on my bullshit action set-pieces but I feel like murder ball is a particularly bad offender. I think the reason is ROLLER BLADES. it’s as if they said: “hey we got 30 minutes of runway left. should we make this a sports movie”

they do the pg-13 one “fuck” thing, but also they murder this dog for no reason.

Actually I think the reason is so she can put the dog’s blood on her face which probably happens in the anime but I imagine they bother to try to explain it.

IMO if you kill a dog your movie is rated R. Ratings are so fucked up.

s/o doesthedogdie.com

The ending is incredibly abrupt. act 4 of a 5 act movie starts at about 1:50:00 / 2:02:00. The last thing you think before the credits roll is “Is that Ed Norton?”

I’m guessing a lot of the weirdness is slavish BC THEY DID IT IN THE ANIME-ism. I haven’t seen it. A cursory glance looks like the anime plays a lot of these abrupt and unnecessary deaths and re-roboting of characters for shock and setting and mythology, and none of that is really present in this movie.

It is simultaneously trying to have everything and nothing; be anime and not, be sexy and not, be violent and not, and the result is completely gray, all of these jarring juxtapositions just come across as mistakes. I hate this movie one Eta* less than I hate SUCKER PUNCH and one Eta more than FINAL FANTASY 7: ADVENT CHILDREN, and SUCKER PUNCH is the worst movie ever made.

*a math term for a number that approaches zero and gets infinitesimally small. which is the number of stars I give this fuckin movie.