Maybe the manga makes sense. Maybe.
From the first glimpse of the cloud city, suspended by some magical amalgam of engineering and hoodoo, dumping rubbish onto a slag heap far below, I thought: “Bespin? Sakaar? Communist commentary on the elites floating above the proles?”
Then as the camera’s eye carried me down to the tarnished Art Deco-atop-Colonial ruin of the city below (did the world plunge straight from 1920 into dystopia? Is that Mexico City’s old Metropolitan Cathedral in the background?) I was taken in by a myriad of fast-flashing details.
There’s a scavenger among the slag. He finds what looks like a beautiful head and upper spine of a manikin. No, wait, not a manikin. The head (Rosa Salazar) is alive, and apparently easily salvageable.
That’s our introduction to Alita: Battle Angel. This is a steampunk-looking cybergrunge future, set three hundred years after an earth-rending war in which planetary forces fought Martian colonials and all of the cloud cities but one fell to the ground in a grand cataclysm, resulting in planetary disaster.
(“The falling cities of the Netherese,” I thought. Really, allusion-hunting is maybe the most fun part of this movie.)
The beautiful head is a remnant of that war, an amnesiac cyborg warrior whose rescuer, Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), sees in her a reflection of his lost daughter. He implants the fragmentary person he’s found into a body originally built for that daughter, and he names her Alita.
From here about half a dozen plots—or “motifs” might be a better word, since none of the storylines is fully realized or very well thought-out—all start at once.
On a geopolitical scale, Iron City below feeds and supplies Zalem above. Iron City citizens are exploited while Zalem citizens, we assume, live in the lap of luxury. We learn Alita has been to Zalem. Will she return there to pick up the thread of her past?
On the sports-movie level, Alita finds some teens who introduce her to the sport of Motorball, a bone-crunching game that everyone plays, from street kids to metal-limbed pros hoping for chance to become champion and ascend to Zalem. Alita, it turns out, is very good at Motorball.
On the noir-street-action level, Alita gets googly-eyed for fellow teen Hugo (Keean Johnson), street Motorball player by day and parts scavenger by night. (Think: you’re using that eyeball until it gets forcibly scavenged). The scavengers are in competition with the Hunter Warriors, bounty hunters who stand in for police—cue point about the privatization of all public services.
But then sometimes they’re on the same team. And they all seem to be working, directly or indirectly, for Vector (Mahershala Ali), who’s a bigwig on the Motorball circuit and who answers to Nova (Edward Norton), an ancient cyborg baddie who seems to run this entire nightmare from his perch in Zalem.
Meanwhile, Vector’s chief wetware tech is Dr. Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), the mother of Alita’s dead namesake. And the two of them seem very interested in Alita’s oh-so-powerful alien technology.
On a military sci-fi level, Alita learns that she was a Martian soldier, a berserker who used a fierce sword and practiced Panzer-Kunst, the Martian berserkers’ signature martial arts style. Alita discovers a Martian ship containing a nanotech body with which she later integrates when her current body gets shredded.
One sweet, unifying note through all this is Alita’s responsiveness. She’s ancient yet she’s newborn. Emotions leap to the uncanny valley of her delicate CGI face; she’s incapable of deceit.
Chocolate? ALL THE CHOCOLATE! Puppy? Take it home! Enemies? Challenge them immediately! Cute boy?
Literally pull out her amaze-o-tech ARC-reactor type heart and offer to give it to him, keeping herself alive on a thrift-shop ticker. (That doesn’t happen. But she is absolutely about to do it.)
Does this sound like a mess? It is a mess. You really can’t stop looking at this movie, but you’re constantly tracking from one incomplete plot to the next, unable to digest anything thoroughly because you’re being distracted by beautiful cityscapes, head-popping violence (this movie likes close-ups of heads being squashed, sliced, and diced), and so many allusions you start to wonder if there’s really anything at all original in this patchwork.
One thing’s for sure. In the next installment, Alita will be on her way to Zalem. Will she win any tournaments there? Will she be dismembered again? Will she discover Earth was the villain of the long-ago war? Will she regain her memory? Will anyone rebuild her poor squished puppy? Will she upend Zalem’s totalitarian rule?
The story could go all sorts of directions from here, probably most of them simultaneously, and the one guarantee is that they’ll all be violent. And yeah, beautiful.