In the 26th century, cyborg technician Dr. Ido finds remains of a derelict cyborg which was thrown down into trash from Zalem, a floating city. Ido manages to revive the cyborg, giving it the name Alita. As she makes friends with teenage boy Hugo, Alita starts having flashbacks of her past, but she can only figure she was a fighter cyborg. Ido turns out to be a bounty hunter who is after Brewishka, a killer cyborg working for Vector, who in turn sells human organs to Zalem, which its Head, Nova, uses for rejuvenation. Alita enlists into a tournament in order to secure cash to help Hugo achieve his dream of going up into Zalem. But Hugo dies while trying to climb the cable connecting Zalem. Alita kills both Brewishka and Vector. She continues working as a fighter cyborg.
Despite its three year long troubled production plagued by delays, the live action adaptation of the eponymous manga, "Alita: Battle Angel" is a surprisingly refreshing and alive achievement, containing enough energy to easily sway the viewers and turn equally as good as the ‘93 OVA "Battle Angel", though still less bloody than the latter. Kudos should be given to the excellent actress Rosa Salazar portraying the heroine - even though her eyes were artificially augmented by CGI in order to make her more anime-like, this actually made her even more expressionistic, whereas her character was already remarkably strong, feminine, charming and resourceful (when an assassin cyborg attacks her by throwing a chain that captures her leg, Alita simply unties herself and throws the chain into a nearby rotating metal grinder, which slowly pulls the cyborg attached to the chain, thereby squashing it). Several plot points regarding Alita’s lost past and the entire nature of the floating city Zalem were left rather vague, though that could be excused since the filmmakers intended for a sequel which would have elaborated on this world more. The relationship between Alita and Hugo could have been developed more, yet one has to admit that it has at least two endearing moments: one is a humorous scene in which a fallen Alita, lying on her back, still holds onto her control panel which keeps rotating the wheels of the roller blades on her feet in the air, the other being Alita’s crazy-sweet idea of removing her robotic heart from her chest for a second in order to tease Hugo that she is giving her heart to him. As with many movies with cyborgs or androids as protagonists, this one also follows the allegorical growing up of a child, from clumsy mistakes and naive innocence up to the bitter realization that the world has much more dark characters and an interwoven top-down system of crimes for them to be so beneath the surface than expected, which all give "Alita" a small round of applause
Grade:++
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