REVIEW: Alita: Battle Angel and its SFX spectacle a long labour of love for filmmaker James Cameron

Alita: Battle Angel never lets audiences down as a diverting visual spectacle. However, when the effects are not to the fore, the movie can revert to futuristic auto-pilot.

Filmmaking ace James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar) has long believed that the manga comics of Yukito Kishiro were a natural commodity for the big screen.

However, as the lead producer and writer of Alita: Battle Angel, Cameron had to wait a few decades until performance-capture technology could properly mirror the deftly mechanised nature of the title character.

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Alita: Battle Angel shows how far performance capture technology has come.

Alita (played by the likeness of actress Rosa Salazar) is a cyborg, you see, and she has only just been reactivated in the year 2563 after centuries of inactivity.

It has been three centuries since Earth was irreversibly ravaged by a cataclysmic war referred to as ‘The Fall’.

As the story picks up momentum in the aptly-named Iron City, Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), a doctor specialising in the treatment and rehabilitation of robots, has found Alita in bits and pieces in a scrapyard.

Alita has gaps in her identity that need to be filled in.

After reassembling her back into a functioning state in the form of a teenage girl, Ido begins schooling his young patient in the ways of a world completely foreign to her.

As was the case with Scarlett Johansson’s Ghost in the Shell, Alita has gaps in her identity that need to be filled in, and a techno-culture all around her that would rather she just obey her programming.

While the movie does find some surprising resonance in Alita’s relationship with her human mentor (Waltz excels when emoting at his CGI co-star), the production truly comes alive with some stunning futuristic action set-pieces.

The production truly comes alive with some stunning futuristic action set-pieces.

It is during one such dazzling scene that Alita comes to the attention of one of the movie’s many (some would say too many) villainous figures, Vector (Mahershala Ali).

He is in the business of acquiring fresh cyborg players for a terrifying sport known as Motorball, best described as a cross between Robot Wars and roller derby.

A little more prominence for Vector and his nefarious interests might have gone a long way in Alita: Battle Angel’s favour.

But the script lets Alita down.

Unfortunately, the movie’s exposition-heavy scripting is not so hot, especially when it comes to keeping an audience truly invested in Alita’s emotional growth (a love-interest sub-plot is a real snooze) or mechanical well-being (the laws governing cyborg life as explained here do not make much sense).

At least when seen in 3-D, Alita: Battle Angel never flags as a complete visual spectacle.

Definitely not quite the game-changer that Cameron envisaged decades ago then, but diverting enough to deliver as pure escapism.

ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (M)

Rating: Three stars (3 out of 5)

Director: Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids)

Starring: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Mahershala Ali, Jennifer Connelly.

Late to the fight, not automatically up to it