Spoiler-Free Alita Battle Angel Review: It Fucking Sucks, Here's Why

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Spoiler-Free Alita: Battle Angel Review:

This movie is fucking terrible.

I beg you from the bottom of my heart not to give it any money or support.

You know what’s a good movie? A movie of tenderness, love, and humanity? Titanic. You know what’s a good movie? A movie with powerful cinematography and sleek action? From Dusk Til Dawn.

The fact that the creative minds behind those movies — movies that I adore — the filmmakers James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez, made Alita: Battle Angel is a fucking insult.

In fact, the brilliant creative minds behind The Matrix’s action, Fury Road’s music, and Altered Carbon’s writing somehow ALL shit the bed in this one: this movie has no goodness in sound, score, or fight scenes.

Perhaps George Lucas is patient zero for some sort of degenerative disease that affects only one’s abilities to make movies. He passed it on to Spielberg, who created the (only mediocre, not horrible) Ready Player One, who has passed it onto James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez, who have in turn passed it onto you, the viewer, and rendered you unable to perceive the quality of any movie ever again.

It feels like literally everybody involved in this film, from the people who wrote and directed it to the people who acted in it to the critics reviewing it to the people in the theater fell asleep for the duration of the production.

Let’s break it down into some categories-


Writing:


This movie’s narrative is a joke. I had almost no idea what was going on or why it was happening or why the film’s plot was connected in any shape or form, despite almost every single line in the movie being exposition (not an exaggeration)

The dialogue, in fact, felt completely unfinished: it feels like they wrote the beats of each scene and what they were supposed to communicate and forgot to, y’know, finish the damn script. Horrible, inhuman, cringey, useless. The fact that the person who wrote Jack & Rose wrote Alita & Hugo pisses me off. He knows how to write well, and has either completely lost his skill from the effects of the Lucas virus or, worse, deliberately dropped the ball and written utter garbage.

The story doesn’t even deliver a satisfying narrative of any kind. We’re never given a clear, present antagonist (except for one who is represented in confusing and poorly depicted sequences) and the movie has no conclusion. It ends about five times, each ending less satisfying than the last, and shoots itself in the foot by making the first scene of the proposed sequel the last scene of the film.


Action:

It’s just… bad. The only reason one might watch this movie (and frankly I even had hope for being good) is some good ol’ Robert Rodriguez action. Or some good Bill Pope action: THE GUY WHO DID THE ACTION FOR THE MATRIX.

Too bad it sucks. The action ranges from incomprehensible scenes of limp metal flying in every direction to derivative sequences that are better executed in the movies they were stolen from. Bill Pope steals from himself and makes the scenes worse, more boring, and more visually illegible than they were in The Matrix, a movie with actual good action that probably wouldn’t be that hard to replicate here.

Awkward slo-mo is the cherry on the shit cake. Hell, there’s a bar fight, and the bar fight scene from From Dusk Til Dawn kicks ass: all he needed to do was that again. Instead, the scene is inconsequential, impossible to visually parse, and uninteresting.


Acting:

I adore Christoph Waltz. I adore him in Django Unchained, I adore him in Inglorious Basterds. Every time he steps onto screen I know he’s going to deliver an emotional, human, powerful performance.

Except here, where he joins the growing line of “people who worked on Alita: Battle Angel who didn’t give a shit” by forgetting to emote at all. I would forgive him on the grounds that he was fed terrible lines, but he doesn’t even try. Nobody else tries. 

The only person who does an even remotely good job is Rosa Salazar as Alita herself, who tries her best given the bland and awkward lines she’s fed. Nothing inspiring, but nice job.


Sound:

I think about Fury Road and I still feel drums banging in my skull and a guitar motivating me out of my theater seat and into a frenzy. I’m not actually sure that Tom Holkenborg wrote the music: it all sounds like stock score overlaid in early production to get a sense for final soundtrack. I’m not kidding, it’s uninspiring, it’s generic, and I was stunned when I realized who made it.

Even the sound design is unfinished: multiple moments in the movie had me confused when I picked out stock, unedited, and totally inappropriate sound effects among the rest (which were fine). The fact that it was literally unfinished it just insulting.


Visuals:

Y’know what’s funny? This film looks great. Unique? No. It looks like the fifteen other post-apocalypse/cyberpunk/dirty sci-fi/dystopian movies that have come out in the last 6 years. But it definitely looks great. Every character’s robotic parts are lovingly rendered, and the nooks and crannies of the sets are developed, distressed, and ooze history.

That’s what pisses me off the most about this stupid movie. HUNDREDS of talented 3D Artists, 3D Animators, set designers, costume designers, prop fabricators, and concept designers put their passion, their energy, and their everything into making this movie great.

They probably got pushed to work 50+ hour weeks in late production making sure everything looked beautiful. They clearly put everything they had into ensuring Alita’s visuals were striking, smooth, and polished.

The people above them? They shit the fucking bed. They made a garbage fucking movie full of garbage writing and garbage acting and garbage music and tasked scores of talented human beings with putting lipstick on a trash fire.

Clearly some people tried: the people relegated to the bottom of the credits, where hopefully they are safe from having their name associated with such a disaster.

This movie isn’t fun to watch. It’s torturous. My fits of so-bad-it’s-good laughter were punctuations to long spans of wanting the movie to just end.

Don’t watch it even for laughs, go watch Avatar, go watch Grindhouse, go watch The Matrix, go watch Fury Road, or any of the other movies the people who made this actually did well with.

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