Alita: Battle Angel tackles the uncanny valley

It seems bizarre that for a man who is undoubtedly one of the great cinema directors, James Cameron’s output is so limited. From Piranha II in 1981 to the present day he has directed only eight films. They have, almost without exception, been phenomenally successful but even so, it’s a niggardly amount.

The truth is that Cameron is a man with a life beyond cinema. His twin passions seem to be exploring the frontiers of our planet and doing the same for the frontiers of technology. The not entirely unintended consequence of all this is that he has changed the face of cinema in the process.

Directing seems like a distraction and Alita: Battle Angel seems like an ideal exemplar of his career. He actually started developing the idea with Guillermo Del Toro almost 20 years ago. The idea was that he would direct a film with an empowered heroine that his then 9-year-old daughter could watch. She’s now in her mid-20s and Cameron has moved out of the director’s chair in favour of Robert Rodriguez, but as producer he still has a clear and abiding influence on the final product,

Based on a hit manga series, Alita is set in the 26^th century some 300 years after an event known as The Fall in which all of the sky cities in which we live fell to the ground following a Martian invasion attempt. There is only one sky city left, Zalem, where the elite live; the rest of us live in Iron City a dystopian community that exists in the shadow of Zalem. The inhabitants of Iron City make a living by picking through the scraps that are literally dumped from the sky.

Doctor Ido (Christopher Waltz) spends his days scavenging the techno-scrap for material he can use to repair and repurpose his human-cyborg hybrid patients. One day he finds what appears to be a functioning android head which he grafts onto a cyborg body; this is Alita (Rosa Salazar).

Alita remembers nothing of her past and the Gepetto-like Ido tries to protect her. However she keeps getting mental flashbacks suggesting she was some kind of robot warrior. It is only when the corrupt Vector (Mahershala Ali), who runs the brutal Motorball sports franchise, comes for her that Alita discovers her true and deadly purpose.

I confess I enjoyed Alita more than I expected to. I went initially out of curiosity to see what Cameron’s tech looked like but got caught up in the energy and excitement of what is a better than average action movie. Cameron has done a tremendous job of world building; Iron City seems real and a place where people could and do live, unlike Wakanda or the communities of Ready Player One (2018).

Some have criticised the film for giving Alita big manga-style eyes, an unusual complaint in a film where most characters are half-human, half-machine. A guy with a bulldozer for a butt is okay but a big-eyed girl is weird? Whatever.

The manga look worked for me and it is a good way of getting over the uncanny valley, our discomfort at artificial characters that look too real. There are actually two Alitas; the first does have that whole uncanny valley vibe, but by the time Alita 2.0 appears she seems much more ‘human’ and therefore acceptable. It’s an incremental approach to the uncanny valley and, for me, it works.

The story is very exciting. Rodriguez and his crew are in their element in the Rollerball-inspired action scenes. This is his most disciplined turn as a director and he obviously benefits from having Cameron, a much bigger beast in the Hollywood jungle, in charge.

Alita herself is a motion capture creation but Salazar does well to give her a personality. Cameron has come up with a new motion capture rig which has two cameras rather than one on the head boom. This really makes the action more immersive and less like watching a video game from a distance.

The big weakness is that there’s a bit too much going on in Alita. It’s pretty obvious that this is at least designed to create a sequel, if not a franchise, and I feel a lot of the detail could be left for later movies. It does make for a fairly breathless storytelling experience where it occasionally needs to take a minute or two to breathe.

With all of the action going on it’s a marvel that Rodriguez gets any performances of note but Salazar and Waltz are good, as is Ali. Jennifer Connelly suffers most; hers is potentially the most interesting character in the human ensemble but there’s not much left on screen which is a shame. She is extremely underused.

In the end I enjoyed Alita: Battle Angel much more than I thought I would and I look forward to seeing what happens next – providing it doesn’t take James Cameron another 19 years!