Texas-native Robert Rodriguez’s latest film, Alita: Battle Angel is the big-budget, Hollywood adaptation of the Japanese manga series, Gunnm The film, which remained in production limbo for nearly 10 years, is a jumbled mess of its source material and nearly every sci-fi film of the 20th century.
The film follows Alita — a cyborg who was discovered and repaired by cyborg scientist Dr. Dyson Ido — as she seeks to learn her place in this dystopian world. The screenplay, written by writer-producer James Cameron, feels as though its sole purpose is to brutally murder even the slightest amount of enjoyment during the runtime. Cameron, who hasn’t written an adequate screenplay in nearly 30 years, is clearly over-reliant on his visual effects team to make up for his inability to generate even a single line of decent, believable dialogue.
For a screenplay that is as bad as Cameron’s, the film’s budget is downright outrageous. The budget, which is rumored to be between $175 and $200 million, just does not make logical sense. With source material that the majority of Americans have never even heard of, this film’s production is bizarre. Hollywood has always been run as a business, so these types of films must have a certain draw to them.
With the budget that this film has, there is a substantial amount of money wasted on acting talent that is completely unused. Mahershala Ali, who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Barry Jenkins’ 2016 film, Moonlight, plays one of the film’s villains, Vector. Ali, who has roughly 10 minutes of total screen time, is clearly just collecting his check in this film. The screenplay obviously plays a major role in restricting him of acting talent, but Ali doesn’t mutter one line of convincing dialogue in this film. Jennifer Connelly, who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Ron Howard’s 2001 film, A Beautiful Mind, is similarly as useless as Ali. Both Ali and Connelly are among the elite of Hollywood acting, but they are reduced to monotonous, lackluster mechanisms to recite Cameron’s uninspired screenplay.
As dreadful as the film’s acting and writing may be, the visual effects of the film are a spectacle. The VFX team features many of the same skilled artists who have worked with Cameron on his previous films, but they don’t venture into new territory as they have in previous films. So, as beautifully stunning the world of the film is, the visuals fail to make up for the lack of a coherent film.
For the Love of Cinema 