Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/27/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twenty-seven-alita-battle-angel/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58897

Alita: Battle Angel is a $170 million dollar production from 2019 that feels and plays like modern CGI effects were superimposed on a cheap, janky science fiction film from 1985, the sort of $6 million, B-movie-level schlock that was put out at the time by Cannon Films or New World Cinema, two of the most notable “make ’em cheap, make our money in home video” studios of that era.

This sounds like an insult, I’m aware, and I’m not sure there’s an easy way to assure anyone that it’s not. I am not saying this film is prettied-up crap. I am saying it has a vibe, and the vibe is: the other movie you rent from a video store on a Friday night, once you’ve gotten the actual movie you came for from the “New Releases” shelf. You know, the one starring that TV actor whose series ended three years ago, and the Playmate of the Year from a decade back. The one that you had to decide between it and a Chuck Norris flick. That film. This is that film. It’s that film, on a whole lot of steroids and Muscle Milk. You can thank Robert Rodriguez for that. More on that in a second.

To call Alita a rehabbed 80s video store second pick is slightly anachronistic. The manga upon which based, in which an android warrior left on a junk heap searches for clues about her identity, debuted in 1990 and would eventually encompass nine volumes. It caught the attention of James Cameron, who apparently heard of it from Guillermo Del Toro(!). For a while Cameron was committed to directing it, but eventually picked another project instead, which would eventually become Avatar, a little indie film that struggled at first to find an audience but would eventually become a cult favorite. Cameron’s attention as a director was thus diverted, but he was still on board as a producer, and after some time another director was found: Robert Rodriguez.

Robert Rodriguez fascinates me a little because he is either a true cinematic polymath, or he’s a weird little control freak, or maybe he’s a little bit of both at the same time. He directs movies. He also writes them, which is not that unusual for a director to do. But then also edits them, acts as director of photography, operates the cameras, composes the scores, does production design, sound design and produces visual effects. It’s possible he acts as crafts services on his sets, too, I just haven’t found the IMDb listing for it.

Rodriguez rather famously got his start in film with El Mariachi, the 1992 action movie he made for just $7,000, if you don’t count the hundreds of thousands of dollars Columbia Pictures put into its post-production and the millions it spent marketing it. But hey, they were the ones to spend that money! Rodriguez himself only spent $7k! When the legend is more interesting than the facts, go with the legend.

No matter what, however, the movie was made for next to nothing, and Rodriguez wrote, directed, shot and edited the film, setting the tone for future projects. He worked fast and tight and lean, and in this, he absolutely resembled the filmmakers from the New World Cinema and Cannon Films eras, who were given not a lot of time and not a lot of money to get their films into the can and into theaters. Prior to Alita, only one of Rodriguez’s films had a budget over $50 million (Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, for $65 million), and nearly all of them made their production budgets back at the box office.

Is there a drawback to Rodriguez’s “fuck it, I’ll do it all myself” sort of sensibility? From a financial point of view, not really. From a creative presentation point of view… well, let’s just say Rodriguez does not lack for style, but you can feel when a corner is being cut, and he’s not always 100% percent in control of his film’s tone or his scripts. He’s mostly good, mostly fast, and mostly cheap, and also sometimes you get the feeling that along the way he says “good enough, print it” and moves on. If you’re a movie exec at a studio, you probably love this, because you know what? He’s probably right! And for what he spends on a movie, even when he’s not, you’re not out much. But that’s how you get the “second pick at the video store” vibe out a movie.

Which brings us back to Alita: Battle Angel. Rodriguez here is rather uncharacteristically credited only once, as director, but he also apparently did an uncredited pass on the script, paring it down from James Cameron’s original 180-page behemoth to something that could be watched without your bladder exploding before the third act (the final script is credited to Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis). The resulting script, however it was completed, is, charitably, disjointed. The progression Alita (Rosa Salazar) has from discarded android foundling to bounty hunter to rollerball athlete to avenging angel is telegraphed more than explained, and the forces she finds herself arrayed against, from bloodthirsty cyborgs to evil billionaires, never really gel into compelling menace. This is very definitely a “things happen because now is the time in the plot where they should happen” kind of movie. Corners, they be cut here!

If this bothers Rodriguez as a director, he gives no sign of it. He just keeps doing his job, shoving the story along, plot point to plot point, action set piece to action set piece. And you know what? His shoving mostly works! You’re not really given all that much time to wonder about the plot holes and omissions, because here’s Alita fighting cyborgs! Then kicking the ass of a whole bar full of cowardly bounty hunters! Then she’s off playing rollerball! (It’s not called rollerball, it’s “motorball,” but come on, there are roller skates and blood.) Rodriguez isn’t here to make much of his own mark visually — this is Jim Cameron’s (and the WETA effect house’s) world. He’s just here to direct traffic, with the biggest budget he’s ever had. He directs traffic just fine. It’s good enough. Print it.

What’s printed is all very heightened and melodramatic and maybe a little bit silly. It has the pulse and feel of a live action anime, because it pretty much is. In the janky 80s version of this film, all of the fight scenes would have been fought in a small dark room with chain link in it for some unfathomable reason, and the rollerball scenes would take place in a disused warehouse in San Pedro. Because it’s the 21st century and this movie has money behind it, we get the the widescreen CGI version with lots of destruction and chrome. The sets very much still feel like sets, though, just bigger, or at least extended by computers. Realism is not what they’re going for here.

Then there’s Rosa Salazar, who plays the title character. As with the Na’vi characters in James Cameron’s Avatar, Salazar’s Alita isn’t Salazar herself, it’s a performance capture. Salazar was on-set, acting the role, and then she was entirely painted out and replaced with a CG version of her character, one that has big anime eyes that skate her right up to the uncanny valley — which is the point for Alita, as she is not actually a human being but a cyborg. With that as a given, Salazar handles the progression from shy confused girl to badass warrior pretty well; what the script sort of slides over in terms of progression is given to her to perform. She provides the most nuanced performance in a film that does not exactly prize nuance.

(The other acting in this film ranges from perfunctory (Christoph Walz as the deceptively kindly doctor who finds Alita) to scene-chewing (Jackie Earle Haley as an improbably buff cyborg) to fluffy (Keean Johnson, as Alita’s love interest, whose hair in this film appears to have been stolen from a lesser Stamos brother). It is also weirdly packed with slumming Oscar winners, with Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali joining Walz in the “too much gold hardware for this film” category. Everybody’s gotta eat, I suppose.)

None of this is brilliant filmmaking, even if it is efficient, and much of it isn’t even necessarily good, but damned if I can’t stop watching it. This is a movie I put on when I want my eyes to see something that I don’t necessarily need to reach my brain — which again sounds like an insult but is not. Sometimes you have a day when you are just plain done, and you want something with pretty lights and cool action scenes and easy-to-follow emotional cues. If doesn’t entirely track on the level of plot or storytelling, well, you’re not in a state to complain about it anyway.

When you’re having one of those days, a little Alita will cure what ails you. Sometimes that second-pick video is the one that hits the spot.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/27/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twenty-seven-alita-battle-angel/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58897