Alita de Pollo: Battle Angel Means Chicken Wing: Battle Angel in Spanish

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

This was the hardest movie for me to review in quite some time. Not because of its content or my opinions, but simply because as a math teacher I automatically type angle instead of angel. Beyond the spelling, Alita: Battle Angel was a fun sci-fi ride, with gorgeous graphics and effective action sequences. Unfortunately, beyond the action, there wasn’t much else to the movie. There is an old adage about TV and filmmaking to show, don’t tell. Apparently, Robert Rodriguez had never heard that, or blatantly ignored it. He wasted the incredibly talented Christoph Waltz as essentially an expository plot device. Every moment of world building was just Waltz’ Dr. Ido explaining things to Alita. Fortunately, this only occupies the first quarter of the movie. After Ido tells Alita and the audience everything they need, the story progresses at a rapid pace. The last two acts of the movie focused on Alita’s physical growth and her rediscovery of herself. The only other character that gets any growth is her boyfriend, but his change is more for self-preservation than anything else. The lack of character development beyond the need to grow in strength was an obvious sign that Alita: Battle Angel was based off an action manga. It had similar pacing to a Dragon Ball Z storyline: fight and beat enemy, fight and lose to stronger enemy, power up, fight stronger enemy again and win, rinse and repeat. I actually enjoyed the simplicity of the pattern. Nothing surprised my except for how unbelievable each action sequence looked. The fight scenes in Alita: Battle Angel are the only reason that I want them to make the sequel that it set up in the last few minutes. It was nice to turn my brain off for the last hour and watch robots tear each other apart. Overall, the acting was fine and the story was fine. It was just a movie designed to deliver the best robot fights possible. I give Alita: Battle Angel $80,000 out of the approximately $130,000 that a real robot leg costs right now.