At the start of “Alita: Battle Angel,” a scientist fishes a robot head out of a trash heap, slaps on a body and treats it like a daughter. By the end of this derivative, heartless mess, you’ll conclude that a garbage dump is exactly where writer-producer James Cameron’s new project belongs.
“Alita,” based on the Japanese manga series “Gunnm,” is about a 26th century cyborg girl (Rosa Salazar in CGI form) who is discovered and rebuilt by a creepy doctor (Christoph Waltz). She has giant eyes, but no memory of who she is or where she came from. While she struggles to unravel the mystery of her identity, the audience just struggles.
It’s set in a dusty metropolis called Iron City, one of the last remaining settlements on Earth after a war with the United Republics of Mars devastated the planet. The town is a mix of Los Angeles from “Blade Runner” and Mos Eisley from “Star Wars,” and seemingly every resident is a dirtbag criminal.
Floating above Iron City is Zalem, a presumably schmancier city that the ground dwellers are forbidden from visiting, but they all dream of moving to. The characters spend the entire film droning on and on about Zalem, but we never see it once.
At this point “Alita” is a merely mediocre setup to a sequel, but things go haywire fast. Unsatisfied with being a nice, android coming-of-age flick, the movie tries on police noir and sports genres for size, with equal incompetence.
Alita’s human boyfriend (Keean Johnson, who clearly shops at the dystopian GAP) wants to escape to Zalem, and is trying to earn the cash to be sneaked inside. Alita, who by now has figured out she knows pretty much every martial art, becomes a thug-offing femme to help him.
The only way legal way of getting to Zalem is by becoming the Motorball champion, so she gives that a shot, too. The game is a ripoff of “Rollerball,” having its players be violent and go around in circles. Why do so many future sports feature roller skates?
The acting is all horrendous from Oscar nominees and winners such as Waltz, Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali. Salazar’s voice work as Alita is a verbalized shrug, and the rest of the performances are noncommittal mumbling.
While the director is Robert Rodriguez, Cameron co-wrote the script. As celebrated as his films such as “Avatar” are, they are not known for their witty banter or turns of phrase. “Titanic” was the rare Best Picture winner to not manage a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination. But the dialogue in “Alita” is so much worse. Take this nonsensical gibberish from one of the film’s 6,000 bland villains: “Welcome to the underworld. This is my world. Here, there are worlds upon worlds upon worlds.” Excuse me?
Are the effects cool? Kinda. They look pleasant, and the 3-D is well done, as most 3-D tends to be these days. What’s odd is that it’s one of the few times that a film with Cameron’s name attached to it doesn’t break any new technological ground. The alien close-ups in “Avatar” were so precise and emotionally honest, it led to a call to get its actors Oscar nods. For “Titanic,” underwater cameras showed us vantages of the sunken ship we’d never seen before.
“Alita” is just pretty. And pretty horrible.