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I feel rather conflicted about writing a review on Robert Rodriguez's Alita: Battle Angel given the fact that I just could not finish it. For me to check something out and be incapable of finishing it is quite a rare event, I usually stick with something to the end to see how it goes, even if I am perhaps just not enjoying it all that much. I give shows and films the benefit of the doubt often enough, and typically avoid watching things I *know* for sure I will dislike. I remember seeing the general excitement for this film when it came out back in 2019, I remember people enjoying it and discussing it often online, managing to obtain a rather cult following somehow. But I avoided watching the film because I felt it just did not interest me.

Why it did not interest me upon release is due to the fact that many years ago I read the Gunnm manga by Yukito Kishiro, having been a big fan of the cyberpunk genre. As is the case when the west adapts something that is an eastern creation, it tends to miss all the magic that ultimately made the original source material so interesting. In the case of Alita: Battle Angel, that is precisely the case this time too. From the moment it started I found myself feeling like I just was not having fun. There are multiple reasons behind this, of which I will write about a bit more as I explore my reasoning for dropping this film before I could even reach the halfway mark -- though that halfway mark is still about an hour in, and still before anything really happens during what felt like a total slog of exposition and boring character introductions.

While I do not remember a whole lot from the source material Gunnm, I do remember the basics in which the cyberpunk elements are juxtaposed with the concept of regaining one's identity after the loss of memory, revealing a larger set of characters and events lived prior. I remember the basic narrative that the 2019 film appears to be following relatively tightly with a few changes here and there, but this feels like a case where source material isn't enough to carry it forward into success because everything else is just incredibly weak.

<center>**The Biggest Weaknesses**</center>

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The first thing I noticed within the film, from the first minute of screentime, was how bright everything looked, followed by a very heavy reliance on special effects for the backgrounds that contributed to the worldbuilding. In the manga, there is this idea that where our characters live is essentially in the garbage dump of the upper class. Within decayed streets and alleyways and sewers are where much of the events unfold. For the most part, we are introduced to a very densely populated city that appears incredibly vibrant and full of markets, full of people coming and going with a very clean aesthetic to them. Backgrounds, unless it was to display an interior, felt so fake. Incredibly weightless and uninteresting. Just completely void of soul. 

This was met with the same struggles in characters too, where in our protagonist, Alita, we see that the production made the incredibly strange decision to use motion capture and special effects to generate her appearance. Why they did this, I have no idea. It certainly doesn't work and again just makes her appearance quite jarring against what sometimes can be very nice lighting and art direction when it comes to interior scenes. Alita's appearance is not unique, however, there are other characters within the film that feature the same special effects treatment, and they are quite terrible. Everything looks like it is pulled straight out of a video game and lacks true movement and detail, particularly against backdrops of genuine sets and locations.

This comparison between real and blatantly not real is what pulled me out of the immersion almost immediately. It was hard to see many of the threats and characters with weight to them when they very clearly do not exist within the frame. The sound design did not contribute well to this when it certainly could have, giving the audience a bit more depth to their movements and sounds, say when a character's metallic body slams into the ground. There wasn't really any of that, so these action sequences just lost me straight away. And this is where another *very* big weakness arises in regards to characters and their designs.

Given that this is a western adaptation for what is quite a niche manga and niche genre at the time, Hollywood thought it would be a great idea to add quite a strong lineup of actors to cast in the film in efforts to pull in a wide audience using faces people recognise when they would not recognise the material already. The film has a very family action style to it that is clearly aimed towards, well, pulling in the family into the theatre and getting those ticket sales. You have your video game action scenes and your known cast members, what more would a family want in regards to a cinema visit? Of course this is intentional and perhaps did work quite well upon its release, but for me I just did not care one bit. The cast just felt so wrong, completely void of the features and styles that would represent this world.

Not only do we have a cast that just don't fit the environment, there is an additional layer to this in poor costume design and makeup, where this cast is far too tidy and clean to be living in what is supposedly the garbage dump lowest-of-the-lowest class. Throw all of this together and you end up with an entire hour of boring exposition that does not really take you anywhere or really give you anything to care about, but does give you elements of worldbuilding that just could have been given to us through visual context. This exposition reliance is nothing new in Hollywood, and just another aspect of the now boring structure of Hollywood productions, particularly in ones that *might* be doing something a little bit different but still wants to ensure it is easy to follow and prints money.

<center>**Just boring**</center>

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I mentioned that sometimes the interior scenes aren't that bad at all. They were the best part of the film given they were nice and wide, offering plenty of detail into the surroundings with some pretty decent lighting. Anything outside was just atrocious, however. But these fancy interior scenes that were not so reliant on special effects were just not enough to keep me entertained. The film lost me from the start as nothing had any weight to it, nothing felt original and real and thus gave me reason to care. The more energetic moments just looked like video game cutscenes mixed between boring exposition that tried to fill in the gaps for context that was in the manga where the film tried to rush ahead of itself. Which is interesting given the film has such a long runtime. It could have been done so much better, especially in the designs of characters. 

This was a typical cyberpunk genre attempt from Hollywood that just failed to understand the idea of cyberpunk. It tried to show the cool parts of it, the mechanical and the robotic, but it was all too flat. And the idea of regaining one's identity from the manga was mostly an after thought present in the exposition rather than having much depth that gave reason to care for the main character. It has really surprised me to see that I came across a film I just could not get through and had to drop, especially when it did have some good elements to it that I usually would have expected to be bad that just were not. Its strengths were just so massively outnumbered by its weaknesses. I don't recommend checking it out if you still have not.

One of these strengths I would like to mention is the cinematography and directing the film had. Some of its action sequences were done quite well, where it knew when to use slow motion and what types of angles and movements to use in them. It was far from being great, but deserves some praise. While scenes did *look* very video game like, it was not really a result of the way the film was shot, but the special effects decisions alone. 

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