Alita: Battle Angel Review - 7 Ups & 3 Downs

James Cameron is no stranger to crafting lush, immersive, compelling 3D sci-fi worlds and he has most definitely passed this knowledge onto Rodriguez.

Iron City and the ever-looming city of Zalem suspended above it present a genuinely compelling dynamic from the start. Visually and thematically, the idea of an aristocratic upper-class looming over the downtrodden, merely dumping their trash on them whenever they please as the lower-class crawl all over one another in an attempt to get up there, is a strikingly well-executed concept. The film revels in this dynamic and plays up the Zalem/Iron City dynamic as an effective surrogate for Heaven/Earth.

One of the biggest pros of the occasionally scattershot narrative is that we get to see a ton of this world, from the perspective of lots of different characters. It's this gargantuan CGI world, yet Rodriguez continuously grounds us in these individual perspectives of it. In using a surprisingly large amount of practical effects for the setting itself and in utilizing Bill Pope's striking 3D cinematography, the film is constantly pulling audiences into this incredibly immersive world.

The end result is that, more so than the vast majority of CGI landscapes these days, Iron City feels like a real and tactile place.