Alita: Battle Angel Review - 7 Ups & 3 Downs

After decades spent in development hell, the live-action adaptation of Yukito Kishiro's manga finally hits the big screen this month with the release of Alita: Battle Angel.

Written and produced by James Cameron, and directed by Robert Rodriguez, the film is a cyberpunk epic centered around the amnesiac cyborg Alita and her adventures in the 26th century.

Despite the talent involved, a great many people have been a bit nervous about this film. Even setting aside the fact that live-action anime adaptations have been historically awful, the film's prolonged development and release-date push backs seemed to give the impression that Fox feared they had a disasterpiece-in-the-making on their hands.

Thankfully, it turns out that this is not the case at all.

While it certainly has its fair share of issues, Alita: Battle Angel is by and large a vastly entertaining blockbuster. It does justice by the source material while also living up to the immense promise of being a film with the creative blueprints of James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez all over it. For many reasons, it is a shockingly great time at the cinema.

With entries such as the entirety of the Spy Kids franchise or The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D in his filmography, Robert Rodriguez is certainly no stranger to juvenile humor. In fact, one could argue it was kind of his bread-and-butter in the early-to-mid-2000s.

And while it's kind of endearing to see how much Rodriguez is still the same creative force behind the camera regardless of budget or targeted age demographic, there are some moments in Alita: Battle Angel which get completely bogged down by some poorly timed attempts at childish or generic humor.

This isn't all the time by any means, as there are some solid gags and moments of visual humor that really work for it. But layering jokes about the size of Alita's breasts (and the inherent judging of her developmental age by them) is more than little ill-advised. In a film that works so hard to turn Alita into an icon of female empowerment that can stand alongside the likes of prior James Cameron characters like Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor, a throwaway line like this undercuts it so hard it is disorienting.

Similarly, one of the film's best action sequences features a pair of in-story-commentators whose role is kind of joyfully goofy for the first few minutes. But once the sequence has gone on for more like ten minutes and these commentators are still droning on with these same cheesy one-liners, it is actively detracting from the sequence and the film itself.