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With his 1992 debut of “ El Mariachi ,” Robert Rodriguez announced himself a director with an eye for action. He prefers to keep his camera movement light and energetic, his edits quick and focused. His movies tend to carry an unmistakable playfulness, like in the all-out barroom brawl between humans and vampires in “From Dusk till Dawn” and the bizarre yet stylish “ Spy Kids ” franchise in which two siblings face off against some truly surreal-looking enemies.

Rodriguez brings this fun-loving, action-fueled touch to the big-screen adaptation of Yukito Kishiro ’s popular manga, Battle Angel Alita , salvaging a project that had languished in development hell since the early aughts. James Cameron , who co-produced the refashioned “Alita: Battle Angel” and co-wrote the screenplay with Rodriguez and Laeta Kalogridis , originally picked up the project around 15 years ago before eventually handing the reins over to Rodriguez. The script is still somewhat unwieldy, chock full of explanations about how robotic bodies work and the history of the decaying setting known as Iron City. Yet, underneath multiple levels of plot and world-building, there’s a weirdo heart keeping the action moving along.

As far as movies about girl robots go, “Alita” isn’t so bad. The movie’s star is a promising Rosa Salazar as the namesake hero, a mysterious yet powerful teen girl bot with oversized anime-style eyes and a good and very powerful heart that could power a city. Alita is the last of her kind, a superior enemy who was somehow were defeated by the humans. After she was found in a scrap heap, Alita is brought back to life with the help of a fatherly doctor, Dr. Ido ( Christoph Waltz ), a paternal relationship that gives “Alita” some of its more stranger moments. More straightforward is the relationship Alita has with a secret nemesis, Chiren ( Jennifer Connelly ), Dr. Ido’s former wife, and Vector ( Mahershala Ali ), a smooth-talking kingpin who promises almost anyone who will listen to him a ticket to Zalem, the city hovering in the sky holding society’s upper class over the heads of the poor below.

Even with so many different creative demands on the story, Rodriguez makes the movie his own. Many of his movies feature Latino actors, like Danny Trejo in the “Machete” movies and Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara in “Spy Kids,” and the trend continues with “Alita” as the Peruvian American Salazar gets the chance to lead a big-budget movie. He includes Spanish and English signs in Iron City, and some of the extras can be heard speaking Spanish in the background. It’s still rare to hear or see Spanish spoken in sci-fi movies about multilingual futures unless the films are from Latin America.

“Alita” draws inspiration from various sci-fi sources, like the physical divide between the rich and the poor in “Metropolis,” the mysterious femme being with incredible powers of “ The Fifth Element ," and the multilingual, neon-lit grimy future world of “ Blade Runner ,” to name a few. Iron City is a place similar to what we’ve seen in other movies, but it’s outfitted with enough differences to tell it apart, like making the society corrupt enough for serial killers and robbing cyborgs of their mechanical parts and giving the place its own gladiatorial-like roller derby that gives Iron City hopefuls their only shot at getting into Zalem. Somehow all of these storylines are interconnected, which adds to the clunkiness of the script but it never allows it to get boring. Some kind of action sequence is always just a few minutes away.

Although Alita is built with some feminist empowerment in mind, some of the messaging malfunctions against old world patriarchy. The odd paternalistic doctor is just the start. Because she looks like a teen girl, of course, she develops a heterosexual crush on a human teen boy, Hugo ( Keean Johnson ). Never mind that she’s actually 300 some years older and very much a cyborg. The two share some cute moments, but others, like when Hugo introduces her to chocolate or when Alita offers Hugo her one-of-a-kind ancient technology heart so he can go up to Zalem, feel so old school. Was this all because she’s an impulsive teen girl? In another scene, after a devastating battle with a big bad cyborg, Alita must trade out the delicate, girlish body the doctor had built for his daughter (not weird—at all!) for a warrior-grade bod that adheres to her, um, vision of herself. That vision includes a corset-sized tiny waist and an athletic set of breasts that defy gravity. It’s been 300 years after the fall and we’re still holding onto Barbie-size proportions.

Thankfully, Salazar smoothes over many of these cumbersome details with her earnest motion-captured performance. She physically leans into the awkwardness of walking around as a teen girl bot, unsure of her new body and discovering its potential and limits. She explores her new surroundings with literal wide-eyed wonder. When she upgrades her body, she stands tall and confident, having sped through puberty in the span of a surgery. Her character’s chutzpah is the reason why it vaguely makes sense to jump from a “hunter killer,” a bounty hunter in futuristic terms, to a Motorball prospect when she’s working her way to becoming a warrior.

With so much background and story to cover, maybe “Alita” would have benefitted from a “less is more” approach. But considering its estimated budget of $200 million, “Alita: Battle Angel” is an awe-inspiring jump for the man who first burst onto the film scene with a movie that cost around $7,000. The visual bonanza cooked up by Rodriguez, cinematographer Bill Pope and editors Stephen E. Rivkin and Ian Silverstein is enough to power through any narrative bumps with quickly paced action and bleak, yet colorful, imagery.

Monica Castillo

Monica Castillo is a critic, journalist, programmer, and curator based in New York City. She is the Senior Film Programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a contributor to RogerEbert.com .

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Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

Rated PG-13

122 minutes

Rosa Salazar as Alita

Christoph Waltz as Dr. Dyson Ido

Ed Skrein as Zapan

Mahershala Ali as Vector

Jennifer Connelly as Chiren

Keean Johnson as Hugo

Michelle Rodriguez as Gelda

Lana Condor as Koyomi

Jackie Earle Haley as Grewishka

Eiza González as Nyssiana

Jorge Lendeborg Jr. as Tanji

Marko Zaror as Ajakutty

Casper Van Dien as Amok

Robert Rodriguez
James Cameron
Laeta Kalogridis
Yukito Kishiro

Cinematography

Ian Silverstein
Stephen E. Rivkin

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Alita: Battle Angel Review

Robert rodriguez's latest is an eye-popping spectacle that doesn't quite live up to the iconic manga..

Alita: Battle Angel Gallery

Rosa Salazar stars as Alita in Alita: Battle Angel from Twentieth Century Fox

Alita: Battle Angel is Robert Rodriguez’s best film in many years. It’s an ambitious, impressive, visually spectacular production with great performances that make its strange world seem real. It’s a shame that, by trying to adapt as much of the original manga as possible, the filmmakers left out most of the intelligent commentary that made “Alita” so powerful in the first place. This is a classic story, and it’s been turned into a film that’s merely very entertaining.

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Alita: Battle Angel Reviews

Our leading character Alita goes through a lot of development throughout this story, and it is engaging to watch.

Full Review | Mar 1, 2024

Alita: Battle Angel is one of those movies that you HAVE TO watch at a movie theater (...) it's a visual experience, so do waste your time and money in supporting this film. Alita alone deserves that effort.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 24, 2023

I really enjoyed watching Alita Battle Angel. This is by far one of the better American live-action adaptations that’s been done.

Full Review | Jan 22, 2023

However simplistic the characters and often banal the dialogue may be, Alita: Battle Angel offers an escapist science-fiction showpiece that may not be high art, but it nonetheless offers an important component of the moviegoing experience: spectacle.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 4, 2022

There's a little too much going on, and then an unearned cliff-hanger.

Full Review | Oct 1, 2021

It occasionally struggles to find its footing narratively, but Alita: Battle Angel proves that nearly two decades of visual-effects development can indeed pay off.

Full Review | Jul 13, 2021

Against all odds, Alita actually works. While previous live-action manga adaptations like Death Note and Ghost in the Shell came out bloated and disingenuous, Alita: Battle Angel is fun, fiery and focused enough to know what it's about.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 8, 2021

Movie fans can only dream what it would have been like had James Cameron decided to fully devote himself to the creation of Alita: Battle Angel.

Full Review | Feb 25, 2021

Remarkably faithful to the two-episode anime from the '90s, which itself was based on Yukito Kishiro's popular manga.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 7, 2020

The storyline may feel like deja vu for some viewers. However, it's still worth quite a watch thanks to its jaw-dropping visuals and an incredible leading performance from Rosa Salazar.

Full Review | Oct 1, 2020

Alita: Battle Angel is a tonally chaotic mess.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4.0 | Sep 1, 2020

Alita's problems overflow when the action tapers, and a lot of this has to do with Rodriguez's direction. He can't sustain interest in quieter moments.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 27, 2020

The narrative is subject to a predictability that never breaks with the conventional when it introduces its plastic characters. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jul 21, 2020

For all of its familiarity and predictability, I still found Alita: Battle Angel a fantastic visual experience and fun virtual ride, with just enough of the unexpected thrown in to keep things interesting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 16, 2020

One of the best live action anime adaptations I've ever seen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 5, 2020

So, what happens when you put together the minds that brought films like Avatar and Sin City to the big screen and have them adapt a manga? You get one of the most visually stunning and narratively imaginative films in a long time.

Full Review | Jun 28, 2020

he film's reverent approach to the source material, warts and all, is simultaneously the film's biggest strength and weakness, but its otherworldly visuals are a worthy spectacle that need to be seen on IMAX or 3D if possible.

Full Review | May 29, 2020

Fun cyberpunk adventure that works well for fans and those who are looking for a good time. [Full review in Spanish].

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 28, 2020

You may or may not be as engaged with the material as I found myself, but I believe that no matter how you feel about it, you'll be glad you spent the time on it.

Full Review | Mar 18, 2020

Alita belongs in the pantheon of great visual spectacle, gonzo sci-fi cult movies with The Fifth Element, Dark City and Speed Racer.

Full Review | Jan 18, 2020

Cast & crew
User reviews

Alita: Battle Angel

A deactivated cyborg's revived, but can't remember anything of her past and goes on a quest to find out who she is. A deactivated cyborg's revived, but can't remember anything of her past and goes on a quest to find out who she is. A deactivated cyborg's revived, but can't remember anything of her past and goes on a quest to find out who she is.

Robert Rodriguez
James Cameron
Laeta Kalogridis
Yukito Kishiro
Rosa Salazar
Christoph Waltz
Jennifer Connelly
2.9K User reviews
398 Critic reviews
53 Metascore
10 wins & 25 nominations

Dr. Dyson Ido

Nurse Gerhad

(as Racer Maximiliano Rodriguez-Avellán)

Master Clive Lee

Jacked Cyborg
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

How Rosa Salazar Brought 'Alita: Battle Angel' to Life

More like this

Did you know

Trivia According to the home-release extras, there was more CGI geometry in just one of Alita's eyes than for the entire character of Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings.'
Goofs Just before the motorball tryout, Alita fails to recognize the Hunter-Warriors on the phony practice team despite meeting and fighting them during the bar scene. Only a couple of them were Hunter-warriors. The rest were bounties. They also weren't a phony practice team. They were low-level players in a qualifying match for the championship, that group specifically hired by Vector to kill Alita. Not to mention, Alita may have recognized them. But there's no reason she'd assume they were there to kill her.

Alita : I do not stand by in the presence of evil!

Crazy credits The 20th Century Fox logo briefly changes to Iron City style, reading "26th Century".
Connections Featured in Hostage 911 (2018)
Soundtracks El Rey De La Calle Written by Robert Rodriguez Performed by Mark Del Castillo and Robert Rodriguez

User reviews 2.9K

jameswwfilm
Feb 5, 2019
How long is Alita: Battle Angel? Powered by Alexa
Will the song "Big Generator" performed by Yes be included in the movie along OST as sung by Alita as Musician in the comics?
Will there be a sequel to this movie?
February 14, 2019 (United States)
United States
Official Facebook
Official Instagram
Alita: Thiên Thần Chiến Binh
Austin, Texas, USA
Twentieth Century Fox
Lightstorm Entertainment
Troublemaker Studios
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$170,000,000 (estimated)
$85,838,210
$28,525,613
Feb 17, 2019
$404,980,543

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 2 minutes
Dolby Atmos
Dolby Surround 7.1

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DVD & Streaming

Alita: Battle Angel

Action/Adventure , Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

February 14, 2019
Rosa Salazar as Alita; Christoph Waltz as Dr. Dyson Ido; Jennifer Connelly as Chiren; Mahershala Ali as Vector; Ed Skrein as Zapan; Jackie Earle Haley as Grewishka; Keean Johnson as Hugo; Jorge Lendeborg Jr. as Tanji; Lana Condor as Koyomi; Idara Victor as Nurse Gerhad

Home Release Date

July 23, 2019
Robert Rodriguez

Distributor

20th Century Fox

Movie Review

She wakes up in a strange bed, in a strange place. She has no memory of who she is.

Oh, she’s a cyborg, of course. She knows that much. Her body is clearly the delicate work of a master builder, but her mind … her mind’s all her own.

If only she knew more of it.

She comes downstairs and meets Dr. Dyson Ido, her new father, surgeon and savior. He rescued her core—her brain, her head, her heart—from a literal scrap heap: The good doctor specializes in patching up and rebuilding cyborgs in Iron City. He gets most of his spare parts from the massive trash dump beneath Zalem—the beautiful metropolis that hovers high above Iron City’s squalor. As he was picking up an arm here and an eye there, he came across the girl’s core, still remarkably alive and functional after plunging into the garbage heap from above. So Ido took her home and gave her a new body, one originally built for his own daughter.

But the doctor’s daughter is dead now, killed by one of Ido’s very own creations. He had planned to destroy her synthetic body, too, but he just couldn’t. It was too precious to Ido, too painful to scrap. So he kept it around. And now, he finds use for it.

It’s a strong body, imbued with all of Ido’s brilliant skill and deep love. So when he gives the body to its new tenant and discovers she has, for the moment, no memories of her past life, Ido gives her a name, too.

Alita . Just like his daughter .

But as much as Ido might want to resurrect his little girl in this cyborg being, Alita’s no blank slate. She might not remember who she was or what she did, but it’s locked in her brain somewhere .

And slowly, it’s beginning to leak out.

Positive Elements

It turns out, Ido’s not just a doctor: He’s something called a hunter-warrior —essentially a bounty hunter who tracks down criminal cyborgs (and, potentially, humans too) and, ahem, neutralizes them, bringing whatever’s left to a central operations hub for cold, hard cash.

It’s a pretty brutal gig, but the cybernetic criminals Ido chases are pretty brutal, too. The tough work that he (and others like him) does keeps Iron City a little bit safer. Moreover, his underlying rationale is pretty honorable, too. Ido moonlights as a hunter-warrior for two reasons: One, it’s a sort of penance for what he sees as his past misdeeds. Two, he needs money for his woefully underfunded clinic. So Ido’s sometimes brutal second job pays for his much-more laudatory first one.

Ido’s perhaps the movie’s most sympathetic character, given his work as a doctor, his firm refusal to go against his own personal ethics and his love for Alita. But obviously, Alita’s the movie’s real hero. She’s a killer, as we eventually learn—literally built for the bloodiest work imaginable. But she’s driven by her own strong moral core, too: “ I do not stand by in the presence of evil ,” she tells her evil opponents. And it’s pretty clear (as we’ll see below) that she means it.

Spiritual Elements

We could explore tons of interesting spiritual rabbit trails if we had the space, from Alita’s literal “salvation” from the scrap heap to the heaven/earth/hell relationship between the floating city of Zalem and Iron City below. (Interestingly, Zalem, pronounced Zolum in the movie, is in the original manga works called Salem , and a powerful facility at the very top of the city is called “Jeru.” Also, Salem’s head computer was named Melchizedek , a reference to the Abrahamic-era king of Salem from Genesis 14.) That said, the movie’s clearly religious references are fairly minimal.

A guy named Hugo takes Alita to an old husk of a church, where the two of them gaze up at Zalem, and Hugo discusses his desire to get there some day—by any means necessary, he suggests. (The same church later serves as a sanctuary for a seriously injured character.) Hugo thinks Vector, a character who serves as Iron City’s shady commissioner of Motorball (which is a rough-‘n’-tumble mashup between roller derby, rugby and basketball), may be his ticket up to Zalem. But Vector encourages Hugo to stay put, paraphrasing Milton’s Paradise Lost : “Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven,” he says.

We also hear a couple of metaphorical references to people’s “demons.” One hunter-warrior uses several cyber-dogs called “hellhounds.”

Zalem’s powerful, mysterious ruler is a mostly unseen guy named Nova, who has the power to temporarily infiltrate the minds and bodies of his minions. Many of those minions treat him with the awe typically reserved for either royalty or divinity, bowing and groveling in his presence.

A war hundreds of years ago, resulting in this dystopian environment, is repeatedly called “the Fall.” Someone bears what looks like a rendition of a ritualistic Aztec calendar on the back of his jacket.

Sexual Content

Alita’s body may be mechanical, but her mind and heart are all teenage girl. She develops a pretty serious emotional attachment to Hugo—at one point literally offering her heart to him. (It’s a pretty advanced mechanical one. She tells him he could sell it to finance his trip to Zalem, then suggests they could get a cheap knock-off heart elsewhere.) That scene also feels oddly intimate because Alita has to unzip her shirt to get to her chest compartment where the heart is located. Alita wants to run off with Hugo, and he tells her that he loves her, too. The two kiss a few times, but things don’t go any further (given Alita’s cyborg physiology). We see Hugo lounge around without a shirt.

Alita’s first body resembles that of, say, a 14-year-old girl. It’s clearly mechanical and robot-like—less realistic than the body of a Barbie doll. Still, we do see her “naked,” as it were—though apart from some feminine curves, there’s nothing else here that one might consider “anatomically correct.” Her second body—very metallic and in shades of blue and purple—is even less “human”-looking than her old one, but it is curvier. We’re told that the body automatically conforms to Alita’s own internal impressions of herself: Ido’s nurse tells him that Alita was clearly older than they thought.

We see what initially appears to be a human woman in fishnet stockings and a trench coat in a dark alley. (She is later revealed as a cyborg.) We also see another human woman in a man’s bed wearing underwear, lingerie-like stockings and a garter belt, though her shirt is less revealing. The intimacy of the scene perhaps implies that the two are lovers, though we never see anything else that would confirm that relationship.

Violent Content

The violence in Alita: Battle Angel is unremitting and oddly brutal—but a bit hard to parse in this space, given that most of the carnage is perpetrated on cyborgs (who seem to feel significantly less pain than we would if we were dismembered). Even the “blood” we see tends to be blue or green. And yet, these characters—most of whom have faces that are far more realistic than Alita’s anime-inspired visage—still feel quite human.

We do see one actual human sliced in half, though the scene is brief and in shadow. (No blood or gore is shown.) A couple of guys get stabbed, and their wounds are clearly terminal. Another human is apparently “disassembled.” Only the victim’s brain, eyes and hands are deemed worthy of keeping, apparently to be reassembled as a cyborg down the road.

Cyborgs are sliced up as a matter of course. In fact, some criminals go around “jacking” cyborgs, stripping them of parts like thieves might do with cars. Arms and legs (and sometimes accompanying built-in weapons) get hacked off and go flying. At other times, most of their bodies are diced up like ham. One scene features a violently dismembered cyborg with just one arm attached—still doing its best to fight. (“Just a flesh wound,” I half expected the victim to say.)

Tearing off a cyborg’s head is a pretty effective way to actually kill one, and we see at least one such head get pinned to a wall after it’s separated from its body. Another head is removed from its useless husk, but the thing is kept alive via a strange blood infusion. Other heads roll about at times. Part of a cyborg’s face is sliced off from the rest of it—which causes its owner a great deal of exasperation (but seemingly very little pain).

Motorball is a particularly bloody contest involving cyborgs. We see these man/machine hybrids race around the arena, crash, get sliced apart and, in one case, explode. In a more playground version of the sport (in which most of the participants seem to be human, except Alita), people get knocked to the ground and, in one case, sent flying head over heels.

Alita instigates a massive fight at a bar catering to hunter-warriors. We see limbs chopped off, bodies breaking tables and faces smashed in.

In flashback, we see what happened to Ido’s wheelchair-bound daughter (though her death takes place off-camera and is only suggested). In another flashback, we witness a massive battle where several people/cyborgs are clearly killed. Someone falls from a tremendous height, apparently to his death. A dog is apparently stepped on and killed. Alita dips her finger in blood and uses it as war paint. We see a human skeleton in an old spacecraft.

We hear rumors of a murderer on the loose in Iron City: He’s killed nine women so far, we’re told. And we see him attack one victim, mostly in the shadows, with something that looks a little like a huge scythe.

Crude or Profane Language

One f-bomb is dropped (which even some secular reviewers found a little off-putting ), and we hear one use of it’s milder stand-in, “freaking.” We also hear an s-word and other profanities, including “b–ch,” “h—,” “d–n,” “pr–k” and “p-ss” and “crap.” Cyborgs are prone to call humans “meat bags” and the like.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Plenty of folks drink at a hunter-warrior bar. Ido sips wine with dinner. Someone pours a couple of glasses of whiskey.

Other Negative Elements

We hear about tension between Iron City’s fully human residents and its cyborg citizens. Hugo’s friend, Tanji, has a serious problem with Hugo’s budding relationship with Alita, for instance, because she’s a cyborg.

Alita increasingly acts like a rebellious teen in some ways, rejecting Ido’s instructions to keep her safe. At one point, she complains to Hugo about Ido’s overprotective stance, telling him, “I’m just tired of it. He just wants me to be his perfect little girl.” Hugo encourages her rebellious attitude, saying, “So you gonna live by his rules or yours?”

[Spoiler Warning] Lots of people/cyborgs lie or keep secrets here. But perhaps the most jarring among them is the one that Hugo keeps. He’s part of an underground “jacking” crew that attacks cyborgs and strips them of useful motorized parts. Though he insists that he’s never killed anyone, it’s clearly a troubling occupation when your girlfriend is, y’know, a cyborg.

Alita: Battle Angel is visually spectacular, often ridiculous and sometimes kinda fun. Based on a 1990 manga series called Gunnm written by Yukito Kishiro, the film offers a dizzying, if overly long, scamper through a well-realized dystopia. A passion project of Titanic / Avatar impresario James Cameron (who co-wrote the screenplay), Alita was directed by Sin City ’s Robert Rodriguez and features no fewer than three Oscar winners: Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali.

Alas, the completely CGI-rendered star, Alita (voiced by Rosa Salazar), with her anime eyes and all-too-showy skin pores, lands squarely in uncanny valley for some, giving the film a rather off-putting heroine at its core.

But Alita’s not the only off-putting element here.

The movie’s violence is at times laughably extreme, with some of the main players trying to do double-duty as relatable characters and tomatoes from late-night knife infomercials. (“It slices! It dices! It hacks off heads!”) Again, the fact that most of this violence is perpetrated on not-fully-human characters may mitigate it a bit; but the sheer volume of this flick’s carnage surely desensitizes us.

In one intense Motorball sequence, the sport’s over-the-top announcer neatly explains the movie title: “She’s got the face of an angel but a body built for battle!” But everyone in the audience—both those at the arena and those in the theater—knows that body could be hacked apart at any time. And whatever else the movie has going for it, that seems like an issue.

Overall, Alita feels both more adult and, in some ways, less mature than your typical PG-13 actioner—a strange combination of the Blade Runner and Twilight movies.

Focus on the Family has also decided to go to battle for those whom some consider disposable. We can’t stand by in the presence of evil. Consider talking to your family about the value of life and joining us in this fight.

Three Actions You Can Take to Advance a Pro-Life Culture

A Declaration of Life for Kids

Valuing Life From the Start

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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‘Alita: Battle Angel’ Review: A Cyberheroine Story Way Past Its Sell-By Date

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

If you want to know what James Cameron has been up to since he achieved worldwide box-office dominance with Avatar 10 years ago — besides tinkering away on a bunch of Avatar sequels we still don’t have release dates for — you may want to check out Alita: Battle Angel. Cameron didn’t direct this cyperpunk epic adapted from Yukito Kishiro’s manga comics, one with a reported budget of $200 million and heavy-lifting from Peter Jackson’s FX team; he handed off that job to B-movie maestro Robert Rodriquez ( Sin City ). But Titanic ’s King of the World produced and co-wrote the screenplay with Laeta Kalogridis ( Shutter Island ) and his grand-to-grandiose touch is all over it. You decide if it’s a fair trade off.

The year is 2563. A female cyborg warrior has spent the past 300 years broken and lifeless in a garbage dump, a remnant of an apocalyptic war (don’t ask) that has wrecked the crowded urban landscape known as Iron City. The elite live in Zalem, a floating metropolis that symbolizes an impossible dream for the worker bees, bounty hunters and criminals below. One of the dreamers is Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), a doctor whose specialty is cyborg repair (as Terminator name checks go, that’s a bingo). It’s a talent that comes in handy when he finds the discarded half-human/half bot girl, who’s been left in pieces and suffers from a serious case of amnesia.

She can’t remember her name — so Ido calls her Alita, the name of his late daughter, and hooks up her brain and powerful, anti-matter heart to a cyberbody he’d been saving since his child was murdered. Paging Dr. Freud! Actress Rosa Salazar ( Parenthood, American Horror Story ) does a fine, motion-capture job playing the reconstructed Alita, except for the distractions that come from a digital makeover that gives her huge, cartoon-like peepers and the smooth, pulled-tight skin of a plastic-surgery addict. It works for the role. Sort of.

How does all this Ghost in the Shell -ifying work for the movie as a whole? That’s another question. Despite the lack of originality, the setup holds a lot of promise, and Rodriquez and Cameron keep it visually exciting, especially when Alita starts regaining her old combat-ready memories and her killer instincts begin kicking in again. Plus Waltz and Salazar add a warmth to their characters that make you eager to know more of their backstories. Instead, it’s lovey-dovey alert when our heroine meets Hugo (Keean Johnson), a human boy of surpassing blandness. If a loaf of Wonderbread could write love scenes, they’d might sound like the cloying flirtations between these two teens.

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Luckily, Hugo gets Alita involved with the game of Motorball, the national pastime in Iron City. It’s a brutal roller derby that can get you killed — or win you a ticket to Zalem. At first, these scenes fly off the screen thanks to the kinetic energy of the filmmaking. Then things start to drag, not just from repetition but from convoluted plotting. It seems that Ido’s ex-wife Chiren (a sinister but fashionable Jennifer Connelly) is conspiring with the villainous Vector (Mahershala Ali, working way below his considerable talents) to fix the game with cyberathletes. Why? There’s a higher power in that city in the sky that wants it so. (Right at the end, we see that the god-head is played by an Oscar-nominated actor, whose identity won’t be spoiled here).

What’s all too clear to see — and it’s a bummer — is that Alita, Battle Angel isn’t really a movie at all. Rather, it’s a fragment, a framework for a sequel, or a series of sequels, that it’s hard to imagine any audience demanding. Even those moments when the movie rouses itself to cinematic vigor are followed by padding and recycling. Cameron has been trying to get Alita’s story on screen for two decades. No wonder it feels wobbly and worked-over. Back then it might have played like gangbusters. But now, after a deluge of comic book epics and other CGI-filled sci-fi fantasies, the movie feels like it’s way past its sell-by date. Alita: Battle Angel looks ready to rock, but time has sucked the life out of the party.

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Wide-eyed warrior … Alita: Battle Angel.

Alita: Battle Angel review – lovestruck tweenies do battle in robot dystopia

Rosa Salazar stars as a cyborg killing machine brought back to life in Robert Rodriguez’s oddly tame postapocalyptic future

R obert Rodriguez has lately been a purveyor of grindhouse-homage laughs with his Machete franchise, and jaded 2D thrills in the Sin City movies. Now he’s in charge of something more conventional and colossal, co-written and co-produced by James Cameron. It’s a coming-of-age melodrama about young love in the postapocalyptic future, centring on a young woman called Alita with “the face of an angel and a body built for battle”, and involving plenty of human-slash-cyborg martial arts.

The entertainment has been scavenged together from the body parts of other movies such as Blade Runner , RoboCop, Rollerball and of course Fritz Lang’s Metropolis , although that last one is now so deeply in the bloodstream of the futurist genre that identifying it as an influence is beside the point.

Alita: Battle Angel is based on the Japanese manga series Gunnm by Yukito Kishiro and like the remake of Ghost in the Shell it has been the subject of whitewashing complaints . Well, the original is set in Kansas, a location that here shifts to an indeterminate polyglot megacity of the 26th century. Its lead female character has the distinctive stylised big-eye look, a manga convention that is, perhaps, neither Asian nor western, as much Snapchat as anything else. The martial art of which she is a master is incidentally called panzer kunst, although no one in this film explains why it’s in German, or translates it: it means armoured art.

Christoph Waltz plays Dr Dyson Ido, a tech-physician who specialises in prosthetic work for the badly injured and repairs for the cyborgs and andro-cyborgs who lumber about in this crowded, chaotic lower-caste city, which sits below a larger place hovering in the sky: a place of legendary privilege that some aspire to see and sample for themselves, if they can somehow get rich enough – perhaps by becoming a star in the fiercely dangerous sport of motorball, whose players often need Dr Ido’s ministrations.

Bad-guy charisma … Mahershala Ali (centre) in Alita: Battle Angel.

While rummaging for reusable discarded tech in a dump, Ido comes across the head and spinal column of a discarded female android. He takes it home and makes it his passion project to reconstruct the entity, fitting it together with the body chassis that he had built for his disabled daughter, a wheelchair user killed in a burglary. When she is complete, this eerily beautiful, sweet-natured teenage girl is given the name his daughter had, Alita, and for a while she acts as Miranda to his Prospero. But when she finds herself in stressful situations, Alita (Rosa Salazar) weirdly snaps into combat-ready mode and flashbacks from her memory cortex reveal that she was once a terrifyingly effective warrior. That is her vocation and her destiny, and will bring her into fateful contact with Ido’s careworn ex-wife Chiren (Jennifer Connelly); Vector (Mahershala Ali), who is involved with motorball at the highest level; Zapan (Ed Skrein), a creepy bounty hunter; and most importantly with Hugo (Keean Johnson), a troubled young mechanic who falls in love with her.

The extravagant cartoon violence involves damage to metal and circuitry rather than flesh and blood, which explains the 12A rating and the air of teen innocence that surrounds an essentially conservative film – despite some rather macabre moments involving the cradling of severed heads and one pretty racy scene when Connelly’s character reveals herself to be wearing stockings and suspenders. Ali’s natural charisma is underused as the scheming and all-powerful Vector, although he brings some reliable bad-guy aplomb. Waltz himself might have been considered for the evil role, although he does perfectly well as the benign father figure. Idara Victor has the underwritten part of Dr Ido’s nurse, Gerhad.

Alita: Battle Angel is a film with Imax spectacle and big effects. But for all its scale, it might end up being put on for 13-year-olds as a sleepover entertainment. It doesn’t have the grownup, challenging, complicated ideas of Ghost in the Shell. A vanilla dystopian romance.

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Alita: Battle Angel Review: Stunning, Melt Your Eyeballs 3D Action

Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron's adaptation of the classic cyberpunk manga Alita: Battle Angel is a special effects marvel.

Alita: Battle Angel is a special effects marvel that raises the 3D bar. The long awaited film adaptation of Yukito Kishiro's hit Japanese manga has melt your eyeballs, stunning action scenes. The superstar pairing of producer/writer James Cameron and director Robert Rodriguez pushes cinema forward. I had high expectations for the look of the film, and am pleased to report they were completely surpassed. If only the plot matched the technical excellence. Alita: Battle Angel gets a bit hokey. The cyborg romance is sappy and uneven, along with several of the characters. The entertainment value does exceed the shortcomings. It's a big-budget, popcorn spectacle that certainly delivers the wow factor.

The film takes place in the 26th century, three hundred years after an apocalyptic war. A motley mix of humans and cyborgs live in the vast and lawless Iron City. Their sole purpose is to serve the citizens of Zalem, a flying city of elites tethered above. Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) is a kind scientist who runs a clinic to repair cybernetic appendages. He scours the garbage falling from Zalem for spare parts. He finds the remains of a powerful female cyborg with an active brain. Dr. Ido constructs a new body, then lovingly names her Alita (Rosa Salazar).

Alita has no memory of her life before Iron City. She is intrigued by her chaotic surroundings, but even more enamored with the hunky Hugo (Keean Johnson). He introduces her to the city's favorite sport, the insanely violent Motorball. The winner of the Motorball competition gets the most desired prize, entrance into Zalem. This is the dream escape of all citizens in Iron City. Alita becomes obsessed with Motorball for a slew of reasons. Her incredible abilities attracting the attention of Motorball's ruthless administrator (Mahershala Ali), and his chief technologist (Jennifer Connelly); who has a long history with Dr. Ido.

Alita: Battle Angel had been in development by James Cameron ( The Terminator , Titanic ) and his production partner Jon Landau for over twenty-years. With Avatar and its sequels on their plate, Cameron brought in Robert Rodriguez ( Spy Kids , Sin City ) to direct the film. The result of this powerhouse collaboration yields next level special effects. Alita: Battle Angel is a feast of sight and sound. The settings, rollercoaster Motorball track, and cyborg crunching battles are astounding. Robert Rodriguez gives Iron City a pulse fueled by adrenaline. The motion capture performances flawlessly integrated into the frenetic action. I was lucky enough to see the film in a state of the art, Dolby 3D cinema with Atmos sound. My seat was actually shaking from the roar of the Motorball races.

Alita's crush on Hugo seems straight out of a cheesy, young adult romance . Her big manga eyes fluttering like a butterfly at everything Hugo does. The human with cyborg intimacy is innocent enough, but borders on the weird and creepy. The film thankfully never treads too deeply into the physical. The romance arc is pivotal to the plot. It needed a less smitten approach. The puppy love scenes are the valleys to the action peaks.

Alita: Battle Angel 's supporting cast is loaded with Oscar winners. They needed character development worthy of their talent. Christoph Waltz, Mahershala Ali, and Jennifer Connelly aren't given much to do. Their characters are more robotic than the cyborgs. This is done to a point on purpose. Cameron wants Alita to have more human feelings that the actual humans. He makes this clear early, then repeatedly comes back to it. This reinforcement detracts from the supporting characters. They have backstories that warranted more range. It would have added greater realism to their interactions. Emotional nuance apart from Alita would have tempered the heavy CGI.

Alita: Battle Angel is rated PG-13, but feels more intense. There are scenes where cyborg limbs are ripped off for black market parts. This may scare the daylights out of younger children. Alita: Battle Angel is a guaranteed hit with cyberpunk, manga, and science fiction fans. More straightforward audiences will be won over by the amazing effects. See Alita: Battle Angel in the best theater possible. It's a premier experience that's worth shelling out extra. Alita: Battle Angel is distributed by 20th Century Fox.

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Alita: Battle Angel review – Dystopian sci-fi movie produced by James Cameron lacks the emotional pull of Titanic or Avatar

It's perfectly serviceable huge screen escapism, but is so full of visual effects that actors risk seeming redundant, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Robert Rodriguez ; Starring: Rosa Salazar, Eiza González, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali , Christoph Waltz . Cert 12A, 121 mins

James Cameron originally intended to direct Alita: Battle Angel himself but eventually left the task to Robert Rodriguez. Cameron produced and co-scripted it instead. It’s a very curious and contradictory affair: a dystopian sci-fi movie based on a Japanese manga series that is brutal one moment and plays like Disney’s Pinocchio the next. It is undeniably spectacular but is so full of visual effects that its actors risk seeming redundant and you wonder why it wasn’t made as an animation.

Alita herself is a welcome change to the macho heroes generally found in cyberpunk sci-fi movies. “Cupcake” or “little flea” as she is nicknamed, she looks like a teenage version of one of those big-eyed, ingenuous heroines found in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated features.

The film opens in 2563, “300 years after the fall.” It is set in Iron City, a seething but shabby metropolis that sits below a massive sky city called Zalem. Christoph Waltz plays Dr Dyson Ido, a scientist first seen picking through a huge scrap heap, looking for robot parts he can salvage. It’s here he finds the head of a female cyborg and realises she is still alive. Her brain is “miraculously intact”. He takes her home, provides her with prosthetic body parts and christens her Alita.

Played appealingly by Rosa Salazar, Alita is very much the innocent abroad. We see her looking at herself in the mirror, trying to piece together her own identity. She may be a cyborg but she is a delicate and very sensitive one who can express emotion (we see her crying) and who has a healthy appetite, even if she does eat the peel on the orange.

Early on, the film shapes up like a cross between a teen movie and a gothic horror picture. One moment, Rodriguez shows us Alita roller skating, playing pick-up games of Iron City’s favourite sport “motorball” with her new human friends. The next, the shadows fall. A Jack the Ripper-like serial killer is on the prowl.

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Waltz’s character isn’t quite the gentle Gepetto-like father figure he first appears to be. He has links with Zalem. He’s a vigilante who goes out after dark with a huge hammer-like object he uses to try to smash rogue cyborgs to pieces. We encounter his former wife, fellow scientist Dr Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), and learn about the child they had together. Dr Chiren is working with the sinister, absurdly named Vector (Mahershala Ali).

The film isn’t helped by the very anodyne romance between Alita and Hugo (Keean Johnson), a blandly good-looking, leather-clad street hustler who becomes her protector and mentor. “It’s a harsh world,” he advises her at one stage. “The strong prey on the weak down here. You’ve got to stay focused on your dream.”

In her pyjamas, sleeping in the cosy bedroom Dyson has made up for her, Alita looks harmless. In fact, as we soon discover, she is one of the most advanced warrior cyborgs ever created. She has an appetite for havoc and carnage.

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Certain scenes here – for example, a mass brawl in a bar in which Alita takes on an army of bounty hunters – could come from one of Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City sci-fi noir movies. With their robot dogs and yakuza swords, these cyborg bounty hunters are tough and mean. The most flamboyant, narcissistic and malevolent, who dresses as if he is in a post-punk band, is Zapan (played by Ed Skrein with a strident cockney accent).

The film’s best moments tend to be its most surrealistic ones, when characters have their eyes gouged out or their robotic arms and legs ripped off, or when cyborgs keep on talking, even after their heads have been decapitated. The fight scenes, chases and very violent motorball games are staged with plenty of energy. There are intriguing, elliptical flashbacks as Alita tries to remember the events which led to her being abandoned on the scrap heap in the first place. With her perfect skin and enormous eyes, she may look like a cartoon figure but she is the most expressive character in the film. It’s a little dismaying to see an actor of the quality of Mahershala Ali playing someone who is little more than a cardboard cut-out B-movie villain.

Seen in IMAX and in 3D, Alita: Battle Angel is perfectly serviceable huge screen escapism. However, it doesn’t have anything like the emotional pull of Cameron’s Titanic or Avatar . It struggles as much as Alita herself to work out its own identity and ends up in a no man’s land between animation and live-action, kids’ movie and dystopian sci-fi. It concludes a little abruptly too. We will have to wait for the sequel (if there is one) to find out what really goes on in the mysterious sky-city of Zalem.

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Screen Rant

Alita: battle angel review - a dazzling, if overambitious sci-fi adventure, alita: battle angel is a mesmerizing feat of filmmaking - and stunning in 3d - that struggles under the weight of adapting such rich source material..

A film adaptation of Yukito Kishiro's manga, Battle Angel Alita , has been in development for quite some time. The cyberpunk manga was published between 1990-1995 and earned a number of devoted fans - including James Cameron, a director who found great success in the 80s and 90s bringing sci-fi and tentpole projects to life on the big screen. Cameron spent more than a decade attempting to crack the potential big screen iteration of Battle Angel Alita . However, the visionary filmmaker eventually moved on to his groundbreaking film franchise, Avatar , and director Robert Rodriguez took over the task of trying to bring Battle Angel Alita to life. Now, the film adaptation of Kishiro's manga finally comes to life with Rodriguez's Alita: Battle Angel , which uses much of the script Cameron wrote. Alita: Battle Angel is a mesmerizing feat of filmmaking - and stunning in 3D - that struggles under the weight of adapting such rich source material.

Alita: Battle Angel follows the titular cyborg, Alita (Rosa Salazar), who's found mostly disassembled in the scrapyard of Iron City by Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz). Ido takes her still living core and attaches it to the cyborg body he had created for his daughter before her death. When the cyborg awakens in Ido's care, he names her Alita after his daughter. But, of course, Alita isn't his daughter and yearns to learn who she really is. Discovering the world around her, Alita is fascinated by Iron City, the remnants of society living beneath the last floating city of Zalem, and its inhabitants - particularly Hugo (Keean Johnson). And Alita is especially enthralled by the sport of Motorball, which Hugo teachers her how to play with some local teenagers.

However, there is a danger lurking just beneath the surface of Iron City - both literally and figuratively. Vector (Mahershala Ali) and Dr. Chiren (Jennifer Connelly) sponsor some of the most successful Motorball players, but they have a side operation that gives them connections to incredibly powerful people in Zalem. As Alita discovers the darkness in Iron City and begins to learn about her history as a warrior, she resolves to become a hunter-warrior (a bounty hunter) and fight against evil, especially the villainous cyborg Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley). As Alita gets closer to discovering who she truly is and her purpose, there are those in both Iron City and Zalem who conspire to take the cyborg down and Alita finds herself in a battle not only for her life, but for the lives of those she loves.

Directed by Rodriguez from a script by Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, it quickly becomes clear that Alita: Battle Angel benefits from the same technical advancements that made Cameron's Avatar such a innovation in terms of 3D filmmaking. Alita: Battle Angel is nothing short of a mesmerizing spectacle and is no doubt best experienced in the highest quality format possible. The world of Iron City, the Badlands and Zalem is full of depth and texture, highlighting each piece of the setting - down to the dust motes floating in the light - in beautifully rendered 3D. The Motorball scenes especially must be highlighted as full of adrenaline-pumping action sequences. Although the Motorball scenes must have been brought to life almost entirely with CGI, the 3D experience helps them to feel more visceral and real. Each aspect of this dystopian world is thought through, and it shows in the carefully wrought filmmaking.

Where Alita: Battle Angel struggles is the story, which was worked on by Cameron, Kalogridis and Rodriguez in an attempt to bring Kishiro's manga to live-action. However, it becomes clear from the inconsistent pacing - at times moving too quickly through events, and other times languishing too long on certain story beats - that this is a much longer story cut down to its barest bones. The result is a two-hour movie that somehow feels three hours long because so much is jam-packed into it, but Alita: Battle Angel still leaves major gaps in the story and world-building. What is included in Alita: Battle Angel is fascinating and the movie does manage to flesh out Iron City and Zalem as much as it can, but it's almost as if the most interesting aspects were saved for a sequel. Alita: Battle Angel is very much an origin story for the titular hero, and it's a solid origin story at that, but it's also one that paves the way for potentially more compelling tales to come.

Since Battle Angel is Alita's origin story, Salazar is tasked with carrying much of the film on her own, and she's further burdened by the task of portraying this character who is digitally altered to have bigger, manga-style eyes. The melding of Salazar's performance and the digital work done to alter the actress in order to bring Alita to life is nothing short of astonishing. There are moments of surreality, but the film surprisingly manages to mostly stay away from any kind of uncanny valley effect, which would have taken viewers right out of this fictional world. No doubt, the heart of Alita's character stems from Salazar, and she embodies the character well. Waltz gets the next most meaty role in Battle Angel , and he does what he can with the character of Ido, just as Johnson does with Hugo. However, with so much focus placed on Alita and moving her story forward, the movie doesn't spend too much time with anyone else.

Ultimately, Alita: Battle Angel does have a decent enough story and script - though there are moments of almost unbearably clunky dialogue that even this all-star cast can't make work. However, the true star of the movie isn't the writing or any of the performances, it's the visuals. To the filmmakers' credit, the visuals are absolutely stunning and if moviegoers have to choose only one 2019 release to see in IMAX 3D, Alita: Battle Angel is it. Further, though the world and story of Battle Angel are a little lackling, they aren't entirely bereft. It's clear that first Cameron, then Rodriguez and Kalogridis crafted this movie with a great deal of love for the property and they wanted to do it justice. However, fans of Battle Angel Alita will have to decide for themselves if it truly honors Kishiro's work.

All in all, Alita: Battle Angel is a must-see for anyone wanting to check out stunning filmmaking in theaters before they run the risk of missing out on the next Avatar -style spectacle. It remains to be seen whether Alita: Battle Angel has even a chance of reaching the heights of success as Avatar , but given the wide world introduced in Rodriguez's movie, hopefully it's successful enough to warrant a sequel. As we've seen from other franchises that have introduced heroes with an origin story film then found greater success once the heroes' stories are truly allowed to flourish, Alita: Battle Angel sets the stage for even more compelling and visually beautiful filmmaking to come.

Alita: Battle Angel is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 122 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

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Alita: Battle Angel Review

06 Feb 2019

Alita: Battle Angel

James Cameron is a filmmaker who’s never failed to surprise us. He gave Alien a kick-ass war-movie sequel and turned an over-budget sinking-ship romance into history’s biggest movie, subsequently outgrossed when he made us all go ga-ga for nine-foot-tall blue cat people. His cinematic visions have always felt awesomely vast and startlingly original.

But what’s surprising about Alita: Battle Angel is how familiar it feels. Its have/have-not divided world, where sky-utopia Zalem floats over the trash-bombed Iron City, was recently done in Elysium . Its plot-driving future-sport, ‘Motorball’, is Rollerball with a Transformers makeover. And its protagonist’s struggle with identity and humanity is right out of Ghost In The Shell (both versions). Even the manga-eyed Alita, while no uncanny valley girl and stunning rendered by Weta Digital’s state-of-the-artists, recalls Ready Player One ’s OASIS avatars.

When Alita pirouettes into action, Rodriguez doesn’t fail to deliver.

Of course, this isn’t strictly a James Cameron film; Alita ’s writer and producer passed the directing reins to Robert Rodriguez . And, like Ghost In The Shell , it’s an elaborate, live-action reskin of a manga-based anime (Yukito Kishiro’s Battle Angel Alita ). But, given he’d held it so close for decades, refining the script and world building with Laeta Kalogridis ( Terminator Genisys , Altered Carbon ), you might have hoped it would feel less like another cyberpunky mash-up and more like a stand-out James Cameron spectacle.

Thankfully, Rodriguez at least proves the right directing understudy, effortlessly upgrading his hands-on, low-fi, free-swaggering style to compete in the megabucks studio arena. When Alita pirouettes into action, crunching cyborg skulls with her slender fists or slicing them into robo-Chum with her iconic Damascus Blade, Rodriguez doesn’t fail to deliver, keeping the choreography slick and inventive, while pushing the 12A rating as far as he can. We’d expect nothing less from the crazyhead behind Desperado , Planet Terror and From Dusk Till Dawn . There’s even a glorious, bloody brawl in a bar-room which feels like a bionic Titty Twister. His glee for squirmy-violent beats is evident throughout, as is his aptitude for lean, propulsive storytelling — during the first hour at least.

When it hits the final act, things start to crumble like Iron City’s masonry. The Motorball thread — will Alita become the sport’s champ and gain access to Zalem? — is strangely side-lined. The romance, between Alita and bland bad-boy Hugo ( Keean Johnson ), is plumped into implausibility. Characters start popping up in places they’d never know to be, just because the plot demands it. And the cliffhanger ending is flagrant sequel-bait, frustratingly delaying the revolutionary resolution Alita deserves. We can only hope that a second film will lift her out of cyber genre conventions and conjure a bit more of that old Cameron magic.

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‘Alita: Battle Angel’ Review: Do Female Cyborgs Dream of Breasts?

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By Manohla Dargis

Feb. 12, 2019

At one point in “Alita: Battle Angel” — another dystopian fantasy that reminds you of just how visionary the original “Blade Runner” was — the cyborg heroine gets a new body. It’s a streamlined shoulder-to-foot job, one that makes her look like a sex doll with a chrome-plated musculoskeletal system. Her new physique turns out to be an innovative weapon and comes with articulated parts, a wasp waist and what looks like a discreet chastity panel for the groin. It also has larger breasts than the old model, a change that in a snort-out-loud line is pinned on Alita’s own ideas about how she should look.

If only someone here were joking or had an idea about the construction of femininity. Why does Alita (Rosa Salazar), who has a human brain, even have breasts? Why does any cyborg that isn’t a sex bot or a wet nurse? Genre convention only partly explains the onscreen look of this character, originally created by Yukito Kishiro in his manga series. Kishiro sexes up his cyborg, an amnesiac who in the first comic retains one protuberant breast when the rest of her body is destroyed. This brings to mind Jessica Rabbit, the bodacious femme fatale in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” who purrs “I’m just drawn that way” — yeah, but by whom, for whom and why?

“Alita” is the latest from James Cameron, though he takes only some of the blame. He helped produce the movie and shares script credit with Laeta Kalogridis (they collaborated on “Avatar”); he was going to direct it himself but handed it off to Robert Rodriguez (“Sin City”). The presence of other “Avatar” veterans — the senior visual effects supervisor, animation supervisor and so on — raised expectations that “Alita” would at least look good, different or inspired. But too much of its overall design feels borrowed, by turns evoking the monochromatic clutter of “District 9,” the vertical favelas of “Ready Player One” and the randomly milling, anonymous hordes of whatever.

A pileup of clichés in service to technological whiz-bangery, “Alita” is one more story of the not quite human brought to life with hubris and bleeding-edge science. It takes place in the 23rd century after a global cataclysm called the Fall. The movie’s story, inspirations and allusions ( Hitchcock! ), though, more rightly announce it as a 20th-century artifact, one that begins when Alita’s head and shoulders are found and refurbished by a paternalistic doctor, Ido (an atypically uneasy Christoph Waltz). Theirs is a post-apocalyptic meet-cute that morphs from yet another riff on Frankenstein’s monster into a sitcom-y father-and-daughter duet, plus brawling and exposition.

The story proceeds by fits and starts with a narrative line — Alita’s journey of self-awareness — that is embellished with a dreary old-fashioned romance and regularly interrupted by chaotic action scenes. Some of this crash-boom stuff takes place during a game called Motorball, one of those survivalist contests that have been a genre staple since at least the 1975 film “Death Race 2000.” The contestants have something to do with Vector (a wasted Mahershala Ali), a regulation villain who takes fashion cues from “The Matrix.” This being a very small world, he lives with Ido’s ex, Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), who when not selling her soul lounges in garters and stockings.

Everything here tends to remind you of something else, including Alita, who was created with performance capture. This involves monitoring and recording a performer’s movements using sensors attached to her face and body, information that becomes the foundation for a character that’s digitally fleshed out. Cameron used a version of this technology to greater effect in “Avatar,” a reminder that whatever his limitations as a filmmaker — he’s a great visual storyteller who’s invariably easier on the eyes than ears — he is a technological wiz. Salazar’s performance, alas, is consistently bland, but then she was drawn and directed that way, like Jessica Rabbit.

It’s easy to imagine that both Salazar and Rodriguez would have fared better if her face had been left alone rather than rendered into a stylized manga cartoon, complete with a heart shape and eyes even bigger than Emma Stone’s. It’s vaguely diverting to stare at Alita’s face, at least at first, to ponder its shape, texture and pale color, and the way that her brow furrows when she’s being emphatic. Mostly, though, what’s interesting about it is that it lacks the conviction, the spark, which turns truly wonderful animated creations — Disney’s Pinocchio, Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo — into characters you laugh with and weep for. This is a matter of style, inspiration and imagination, or their absence.

There’s so little at stake in “Alita: Battle Angel” that it blurs into uninvolving spasms of visual and aural noise as it lurches to the cliffhanger ending, a setup for promised sequels. If you stick around for the end credits, you will read that “the making and authorized distribution of this film supported over 15,000 jobs and involved hundreds of thousands of work hours.” In other words, piracy threatens the American movie industry, even if a chunk of the jobs here seem to have originated outside the United States. It’s still a worthy wag of the finger, although it’s difficult not to wish that more of those hours had been spent telling a really good story instead of tweaking tech and shiny breasts.

Alita: Battle Angel Rated PG-13 for regular violence, including cyborg dismemberment. In English and Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes.

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Alita: Battle Angel Is Ungainly, Hokey, and … Kinda Charming

The most impressive aspect of Alita: Battle Angel is its cliffhanger ending. The entire film teases a shadowy Big Bad, who is only seen in silhouette and then in the film’s final moments, played by a Surprise Big Name Actor, is alive and well and waiting to be conquered by our titular cyborg heroine. The impressiveness isn’t the execution of this ending, but that it exists at all. Clearly, director Robert Rodriguez and producer James Cameron believe the world will catch Alita Fever.

They wouldn’t be terribly misguided to think so, despite the historic uphill battle of anyone seeking to make a tentpole franchise out of a non-comic-book property. ( Alita is based on the 1990s manga series Battle Angel Alita , but so far adaptations of non-domestic comics have had a rough go of it at the American box office.) Alita: Battle Angel is an engaging piece of thoroughly computer-generated action pop, hokey and amiable and filled with enough set pieces to never drag. Its story is familiar enough that you can tune out once people start talking about how they “need to rebuild a quad servo” and still get the gist. Alita has confidence in spades, which is enough to keep it afloat for its two-plus-hour run time.

But it also has Rosa Salazar, who plays the title character, an amnesiac cyborg found in a junk heap by cybernetics doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz). And while most people reading this review will be curious to know if her character’s unnerving enlarged eyes will be either distractingly uncanny or full-blown nightmare material, I found I had completely forgotten about them by the second scene she’s in. Salazar, who plays this big-eyed, cyber-bodied version of herself through motion capture, is such a magnetic, sympathetic presence, that even through that layer of digitization she feels like an irrepressibly organic presence. When her dopey love interest Hugo (Keean Johnson) caresses her metal and purple-jelly hand and tells her she’s “the most human person I’ve ever known,” it doesn’t sound incorrect.

After being salvaged and outfitted with a cybernetic body by Dr. Ido, Alita is effectively adopted by him — the body he gives her is one he had been saving for his dead daughter. (The mind reels at the subtext.) Then, as all cybernetic cyberpunk heroes must do at some point, she begins to try to piece together her past. Chiefly, she wants to know what she was doing in a pile of refuse from Zalem, the supposed utopian floating city that hovers above the more rough-and-tumble Iron City, and then, why she’s holding an arsenal of physics-defying martial-arts training inside her diminutive. But Alita’s “who am I” conundrum bypasses the predictable heavy-handed ennui usually found in the genre, because Alita is just too darn perky. She’s stoked on life on Earth; everything — especially anything having to do with conflict or Iron City’s countless blade-limbed, razor-fingered cybernetic bounty hunters — is thrilling and new to her. She’s Jason Bourne crossed with the Little Mermaid.

Once Alita begins to unlock her potential as a Battle Angel, the movie has an awful lot to juggle — not only the origin of her advance-tech heart (so powerful it could power the whole city for a year!) but the people who seek to steal it for nefarious purposes, including Ido’s ex-wife Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), another cybernetics doctor who works with Vector (Mahershala Ali) to create superpowered cyberathletes to compete in everyone’s favorite sport, Motorball. Ah, yes, Motorball — a pretty great future-sport in the realm of ridiculous fictional future-sports, which the movie devotes a shocking amount of time to, and could have devoted even more time to if it wanted. Make a whole Motorball movie, James Cameron! The brutal sport kind of plays out like roller derby crossed with rugby, and it also happens to be one of the only ways a lowly commoner can hope to ascend to Zalem. Alita’s a natural at it, and decides to turn pro over the course of the movie.

She also becomes a “hunter warrior,” the bounty hunters that are the only form of law enforcement in Iron City. Basically, Alita has a lot of jobs, but really only one true job: Battle Angel, a job that doesn’t even exist anymore since the War on the Moon (listen, do you want to know what that is, or do you want this review to come in under 1,000 words?) but makes her uniquely qualified for all the other ones. When she’s finally united with her true, 300-year-old super-regenerating cyberbody, a kind of peace and certainty settles on Salazar’s performance. Alita: Battle Angel is as much a story about body alienation and body acceptance as it is about a girl just trying to figure out the best career for her skill set, and when viewed that way, it’s quite relatable.

Rodriguez’s action is punchy and engaging and legible — it’s a huge help that Iron City has outlawed guns, making all the action dependent on motion-capture martial arts and melee. One fight scene ends with a brutally damaged Alita springing off of her one remaining arm to defeat her opponent, and even though I knew I was watching an array of deftly manipulated ones and zeroes, I felt the urge to clap. But the only reason any of this works at all is Salazar and, I hate to say it, those goddamned big eyes. They’re the windows to the soul, after all, and this ungainly, lurching cyborg of a would-be blockbuster has more of that than meets the eye.

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Alita: battle angel, common sense media reviewers.

Big effects, lifeless characters in sci-fi action tale.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Very simple messages have to do with the class sys

Some characters try to be good in a difficult worl

Lots of fantasy violence. Martial arts-style fight

Sexualized, objectified female characters. Scene o

A use of "f--k," plus infrequent uses of "s--t," "

Secondary characters drink whisky. Young man says

Positive Messages

Very simple messages have to do with the class system; i.e., a lack of sharing between rich and poor causes a great, horrible divide. Though movie also has themes of female empowerment, they're wrapped up in character who's somewhat objectified for her looks.

Positive Role Models

Some characters try to be good in a difficult world, and others are evil, but characters aren't fleshed out enough to be truly relatable role models. Some objectification of main character.

Violence & Scariness

Lots of fantasy violence. Martial arts-style fighting. Weapons. Slicing with blades. Stabbing. Characters are killed. A dog is killed. Blood shown (cyborg blood is blue). Punching. Threats. Screaming.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Sexualized, objectified female characters. Scene of flirting/kissing between young man and female cyborg. Young man shown shirtless.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

A use of "f--k," plus infrequent uses of "s--t," "bitch," "piss," "pr--k," "hell," "crap."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Secondary characters drink whisky. Young man says he drank "too much" the night before (sort of hung over). Secondary character smokes a cigarette.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Alita: Battle Angel is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi action movie about a resurrected teen cyborg named Alita ( Rosa Salazar ). Expect lots of fantasy violence and fighting, including punching, stabbing, slicing, death, and blood (both red human and blue cyborg). Female characters, including Alita, are sexualized and objectified, sometimes in an unsettling way. There's some flirting and kissing between Alita and a young man. Language includes one "f--k" and infrequent use of other words like "crap" and "piss." A secondary character drinks whisky in more than one scene, a young man mentions having had a bit too much, and a secondary character smokes. Co-written by James Cameron , directed by Robert Rodriguez , and based on a manga by Yukito Kishiro, the movie is a guaranteed slam-dunk for fans of the above, but for others, it may feel lifeless and overly reliant on visual effects. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (81)
Kids say (65)

Based on 81 parent reviews

Absolutely Amazing Movie

Alita: role model, what's the story.

In ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL, it's the 26th century, and the world has been devastated by "The Fall." Dr. Dyson Ido ( Christoph Waltz ) rummages through a scrapyard and finds a cyborg girl with an intact brain. He brings her back to his lab and gives her a new body, calling her "Alita" ( Rosa Salazar ). She's instantly drawn to a boy named Hugo ( Keean Johnson ), as well as to a violent sport called Motorball. Hugo secretly works for shady businessman Vector ( Mahershala Ali ), helping sabotage the professional Motorball matches; Hugo hopes to earn enough money to get to the utopian sky city of Zalem. As Alita begins to learn more about her past and discovers her fighting abilities, she enters a Motorball tryout. But the evil Nova has ordered her killed. Can Alita avoid an army of attacking cyborgs while saving the day?

Is It Any Good?

This juggernaut-sized sci-fi movie mechanically rehashes a huge collection of genre clichés while bashing its way through an onslaught of visual effects, bad dialogue, and dull, lifeless characters. Co-written by James Cameron and directed by Robert Rodriguez , Alita: Battle Angel feels lost in a bubble; it's clueless about the real world, about real emotions, or about any other, grindingly similar movies that have come out in the real world ( Elysium , Ghost in the Shell , Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets , Ready Player One , Mortal Engines , etc.). It's less like the characters are making decisions than they're being pushed through an automatic computer program. The movie has state-of-the-art visual effects, but they aren't enough to rescue Alita from seeming like a visual effect, rather than a character, all the way through.

The other characters aren't human enough themselves to reflect her supposed humanity. Perhaps worse, she's sexualized in an unsettling way, a little like the famous Maria robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis , but creepier. Overall, Alita: Battle Angel seems to have practically nothing to say. Not even the post-apocalyptic setting appears to be warning humanity about anything in particular. Rodriguez' direction is competent, of course, and the action scenes are well-executed (except for one too many scenes of actors running through crowds and shoving extras aside), but the project isn't really much more than an empty, noisy, soulless, vaguely unpleasant special effects extravaganza.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Alita: Battle Angel 's violence . Does the fact that it's relatively bloodless and nonrealistic affect its impact ? Why or why not?

Is Alita presented as a sexual being? Is she sexualized or objectified? What kind of body image is represented?

What's the appeal of the post-apocalyptic genre? What does it try to teach us? Do you think this movie is trying to teach viewers something in particular -- or warn them against something?

What does the movie have to say about social classes? Are classes meant to be different and separate? What keeps people from sharing with each other?

Do you think this movie is a good example of female empowerment? Is there a cost for the main character's power and freedom? Do you think the characters' relationships are healthy? Honest?

Movie Details

In theaters : February 14, 2019
On DVD or streaming : July 23, 2019
Cast : Rosa Salazar , Mahershala Ali , Jennifer Connelly , Christoph Waltz
Director : Robert Rodriguez
Inclusion Information : Latino directors, Female actors, Latino actors, Black actors
Studio : Twentieth Century Fox
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Robots
Run time : 122 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language
Last updated : January 20, 2024

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Alita: Battle Angel (United States, 2019)

Alita ’s background might be considered “standard dystopian.” It takes place in the 26 th century, 300 years after “The Fall” (a war with Mars that devastated Earth). A cybersurgeon, Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), finds the remains of a cybernetic warrior (with the human brain still intact and functioning) in a junk yard. He brings the “core” back to his workshop and installs her into a body he had developed for his murdered teenage daughter and gives her a name: Alita (Rosa Salazar). Alita awakens with complete amnesia and, over the span of several days, becomes familiar with her new body and the feelings that come with it. She is instantly infatuated with one of Dr. Ido’s young associates, Hugo (Keean Johnson), but others in the doctor’s circle aren’t as friendly – notably Ido’s ex, Chiren (Jennifer Connelly).

Alita’s look and voice are supplied by a motion-captured Rosa Salazar (her familiarity with these kinds of films hearkens back to the Maze Runner movies, where she played Brenda). She’s a relatable and appealing character and, when circumstances force her to shed her adopted identity of a fragile, naïve girl, it’s hard to resist applauding. Her appearance – almost human yet obviously synthetic with wide manga-inspired eyes – may provoke disparate reactions. It worked for me but some may find there to be something creepy or unsettling about her. None of the film’s human characters match Alita for audience identification nor are there any acting surprises to be found here. The various Oscar-winners – Jennifer Connelly, Christoph Waltz, Mahershala Ali – do what’s expected of them in a production more interested in technical accomplishments than great performances.

One could argue that there’s a little too much going on for a two-hour movie overstuffed with subplots that never achieve escape velocity. The whole “Motorball” element, for example, feels strangely underdeveloped – we keep expecting it to be more important than it ultimately is. Nevertheless, Rodriquez nails the pacing – it’s slow enough to allow for character development (at least where Alita is concerned) but ramps up during the well-choreographed battle and chase sequences. Everything moves along fine…at least until the final few minutes when it becomes apparent that we’re about to be victimized by a story that requires multiple installments to play out. Although Alita finds a convenient stopping point to run the end credits, it’s more of a pause than a true conclusion, leaving the viewer frustratingly unfulfilled. Without a follow-up, the character’s story will be left incomplete – another example of filmmakers whose hubris about the inevitability of sequels will likely leave fans high and dry. Put this one on the shelf alongside The Golden Compass and Divergent .

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ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL

"female heroine fights evil at all costs".

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: Lying, evil, greed, anger.

More Detail:

Set 500 years in the future, ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL follows a female cyborg warrior named Alita who wakens in a post-apocalyptic world where she must learn who she truly is while navigating a world of injustice.

In the 23rd Century, Earth underwent “the Fall,” a shattering war that halted all technological progress and left a society where every last shred of technology is repurposed and the strong prey on the weak. Three hundred years later, rich melting pot of survivors lives in in Iron City, a city full of ordinary people and cybernetically-enhanced humans living side-by-side in the shadow of Zalem, the last of the great Sky cities. Iron City is an oppressed factory town where the people crank out goods for the invisible elites living in Zalem.

While walking around in the wasteland underneath Zalem, Dr. Ido (Christoph Waltz) finds the head and shoulders of a female, barely alive. Taking her home with him, he fashions her head to a mechanical body he’s created and calls her “little angel.” Dr. Ido explains to her that her brain is very human although her new body isn’t. He gives her the name “Alita” and explains a brief history of Iron City.

Shortly thereafter, Alita spectacularly saves a dog from getting run over by a robot in the middle of the street. A young man named Hugo notices Alita’s amazing skills and begins a conversation with her.

As Alita learns to navigate her new life and the treacherous streets of Iron City, Dr. Ido tries to shield her from her mysterious history. Meanwhile, her street-smart new friend, Hugo, offers instead to help trigger her memories. However, it is only when the deadly and corrupt forces that run the city, headed by Vector and Dr. Ido’s ex-wife, come after her and Ido that Alita discovers a clue to her past. It turns out she has unique fighting abilities ingrained in her that those in power will stop at nothing to control. If she can stay out of their grasp, she could be the key to saving her friends, her new family and the world she’s grown to love.

ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL has some impressive special effects and thrilling action sequences that will entertain science fiction fans. Christoph Waltz gives a solid performance, different than his usual typecasting as the villain, and Rosa Salasa is compelling as Alita. However, the story and characters are a little too complicated, making the movie seem longer than it actually is.

Happily, ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL has a strong Christian worldview that evokes many allegorical messages. For example, the movie’s references to “the fall” stress the corruption of power and sin. At one point, Alita says, “I will not stand by in the presence of evil.” At another point, she and Hugo hide in an abandoned church and find protection. Also, in one scene, the villain, Vector, says, “I’d rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” His comment echoes Satan’s comment in John Milton’s classic Christian poem PARADISE LOST. ALITA also touches on the idea of indulgences or buying your way into heaven. For example, in the story, different characters are trying to buy their way into Zalem, the sky city. Eventually, Dr. Ido’s wife sees the error of her greed and desires to be different.

ALITA also has some light Romantic elements centering on Alita’s budding romance with Hugo. The movie also has some foul language and lots of action violence. For these reasons, MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for older children and teenagers.

Now more than ever we’re bombarded by darkness in media, movies, and TV. Movieguide® has fought back for almost 40 years, working within Hollywood to propel uplifting and positive content. We’re proud to say we’ve collaborated with some of the top industry players to influence and redeem entertainment for Jesus. Still, the most influential person in Hollywood is you. The viewer.

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The 10 Best Junkie XL Movie Scores, Ranked

Tom Holkenborg is one of the best composers of our time.

Tom Holkenborg, who also goes by Junkie XL, has successfully created a distinguished career as a film composer, after starting out as a DJ and electronic music producer. Holkenborg seamlessly transitioned into film scoring in Hollywood, which he first started by assisting composer Harry Gregson Williams in 2005's Domino and working alongside Hans Zimmer in movies such as Inception and Megamind . Showcasing his innovative approach to composition through electronic elements, rock and orchestral arrangements, his scores are renowned for kinetic percussion and experimental, genre-defying music.

Junkie XL has created scores for a diverse range of films, from action blockbusters to animated features, including movies produced by Hollywood titans like James Cameron and Peter Jackson . Holkenborg's continued collaborations with acclaimed directors like George Miller and Zack Snyder showed that he is a team player and cemented his status as one of the industry's most sought-after composers—he is scoring four blockbusters this year. His scores enhanced the cinematic experience and also elevate storytelling, especially in movies that have immersive worlds. From historical sword-and-sandal action to superhero epics, let's take a look at his best works to date.

10 'Sonic The Hedgehog' (2020)

Directed by jeff fowler.

Based on the iconic video game franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog follows the speedy Sonic as he teams up with a small-town sheriff named Tom to face the nefarious Dr. Robotnik ( Jim Carrey ). The movie was a surprise hit in 2020 and generated a sequel with a third movie coming up later in 2024, which will also be scored by Junkie XL.

Junkie XL created a unique score for the movie by utilizing vintage instruments to emulate the original game music. He used synthesizers to recreate the sounds heard in the SEGA game. Being the experimental composer that he is, Junkie XL also used his own guitar amplifiers, distortion pedals, synthesizers and radio amplifiers. The result is one of his most entertaining scores so far, with some critics saying that it is one of his best.

Sonic the Hedgehog

WATCH ON Amazon

9 'Alita: Battle Angel' (2015)

Directed by robert rodriguez.

Directed by Robert Rodriguez and produced by James Cameron, Alita: Battle Angel is set in a dystopian future where cyborgs and humans coexist. The story follows Alita, a cyborg with no memory of her past, as she embarks on a journey to discover her purpose. With groundbreaking visual effects and its immersive world, the film has developed a cult following among moviegoers .

Junkie XL's score for this film is a blend of futuristic sounds and epic orchestration, complementing the film's aesthetic and heartfelt storytelling. For the orchestration, he was influenced by the music of classic movies such as Casablanca. Through sweeping melodies, pulsating rhythms, and haunting themes, he managed to capture the essence of Alita's journey of self-discovery and redemption. His work also extended to co-writing the movie's theme song with Dua Lipa titled 'Swan Song'.

Alita: Battle Angel

Watch on Fubo

8 '300: Rise of an Empire' (2014)

Directed by noam murro.

300: Rise of an Empire is a gripping follow-up to the 2007 hit 300 , following the epic naval battles between the Greek city-states headed by Themistocles ( Sullivan Stapleton ) and the invading Persian forces led by the vengeful naval commander Artemisia ( Eva Green ). The film explores events concurrent to the first film as well as the events that happened afterward. Similar to its predecessor, the film boasts stunning visuals and brutal action sequences.

This movie is Junkie XL's first foray into scoring a major Hollywood tentpole and the beginning of his collaboration with Zack Snyder who served as a producer. Junkie XL crafted a score that amplifies the visceral intensity and epic scale of the film's ancient warfare. With pounding percussion and driving rhythms, his music propels the action forward, immersing audiences in the battle sequences and conflicts that define the film's experience.

300: Rise of an Empire

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7 'Godzilla vs. Kong' (2021)

Directed by adam wingard.

Godzilla vs Kong pit two legends, Godzilla and Kong, as they clash for supremacy while another threat looms. Directed by Adam Wingard, the film delivers thrilling action sequences as the two creatures collide across land and sea. Godzilla vs Kong offers a thrilling experience that honors the legacy of these iconic monsters just by keeping the focus on the two titans.

Junkie XL plays to his strength in this film by delivering a thunderous and electrifying score that amplifies the clash between Godzilla and Kong. Through bombastic themes, he heightens the film's sense of spectacle, immersing viewers as the fight tears down cities. With Godzilla and Kong teaming up in the new film , Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire , Junkie XL joins the team as the film's composer.

Godzilla vs. Kong

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6 'Mortal Engines' (2018)

Directed by christian rivers.

Produced by Peter Jackson , Mortal Engines is a post-apocalyptic film set in a world where mobile cities roam the desolate landscape, devouring smaller towns for resources in a Darwinian struggle for survival. The movie stars Hera Hilmar , Robert Sheehan and Hugo Weaving . Unfortunately, the film did not find its audience during a crowded time in the cinemas and was one of the year's biggest bombs.

Nevertheless, Junkie XL's score for Mortal Engines ranks as one of his most dynamic and versatile works. He worked with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra to create music that was inspired by classics such as Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. His epic orchestration and rich brass sounds underscore the film's action sequences and emotional beats, enhancing the film's tension and resonance.

Mortal Engines

5 'batman v superman: dawn of justice' (2016), directed by zack snyder.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a superhero epic that pits the DC Comics icons Batman and Superman against each other. Directed by Zack Snyder , the film also doubles as the dawn of the DC Extended Universe which has now been overhauled into DC Universe. The movie was considered a critical disappointment but it has its own strong following that resonated with the film's themes.

Junkie XL collaborated with Hans Zimmer to create a powerful and evocative score that mirrors the film's epic showdown between two iconic superheroes. Originally Zimmer was only going to focus on Superman themes and Junkie XL on the Batman side. Ultimately, the theme for Batman was written by both. Zimmer and Junkie XL went on to compose for other movies in the DCEU, namely Wonder Woman 1984 and Zack Snyder's Justice League .

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

4 'deadpool' (2018), directed by tim miller.

Deadpool follows the unconventional antihero Wade Wilson ( Ryan Reynolds ), who undergoes a rogue experiment to cure his cancer, leaving him with accelerated healing powers but a disfigured appearance. As the witty and irreverent Deadpool, he tracks down the man responsible while also breaking the fourth wall in the process.

Junkie XL's infused the film with a mix of edgy electronic beats, rock-infused themes, and tongue-in-cheek motifs. His eclectic score mirrors the film's unconventional tone, seamlessly blending humor with high-octane action sequences. To capture Deadpool's 1990s references and jokes, Junkie XL's used instruments from that decade to match the character's energy.

3 'Zack Snyder's Justice League' (2021)

Zack Snyder's Justice League is an epic superhero ensemble film that unites iconic superheros as they join forces to combat the threat posed by the Steppenwolf and his quest for the powerful Mother Boxes. With Snyder's vision restored in its four-hour glory, the film offers a deeper exploration of each hero's journey while introducing new elements and character arcs.

Junkie XL returned to the composer's chair after being replaced on the theatrical cut. His score is a sweeping and epic composition that captures the grandeur and scale of DC's iconic superheroes. His task was beyond composing music for the titular team, he also made a memorable Flash theme, an emotional Cyborg theme, a new, optimistic Batman theme, and his own variation of the Wonder Woman theme. Snyder was clearly satisfied as he reteamed with Junkie XL for Army of the Dead and Rebel Moon .

Zack Snyder's Justice League

2 'three thousand years of longing' (2022), directed by george miller.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is a captivating tale of love, desire, and magic directed by George Miller , which follows the unlikely encounter between a lonely woman and a cunning djinn who grants her deepest wishes. Starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in the leading roles, the film was critical darling during its run in cinemas and film festivals.

Junkie XL demonstrates his versatility and growth as a composer, crafting a haunting and atmospheric score that underscores the film's mystical and mystical elements. His usual percussions are minimal, but audiences can hear more ethereal vocals, strings, and mesmerizing melodies. His score managed to reflect the magical and timeless tale, resulting in one of his best work to date.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

1 'mad max: fury road' (2015).

Mad Max: Fury Road is an action masterpiece set in a dystopian wasteland, where Max Rockatansky ( Tom Hardy ) joins the fearless Imperator Furiosa ( Charlize Theron ) who rebels against a tyrannical ruler, Immortan Joe. The film was a critical and commercial success, culminating in its six Academy Award wins.

Junkie XL's score is a powerful pulsating energy of relentless intensity, perfectly complementing the film's high-octane action. His use of strong percussion, distorted guitars and haunting melody enriched the film's visuals. The score's omission from the Oscars was widely viewed as a snub as the music played a huge part in the film. This summer, Junkie XL is coming back to the Wasteland to score Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga starring Anya-Taylor Joy .

Mad Max: Fury Road

NEXT: 10 Movie Composers Whose Work You Will Recognize Immediately

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Battle Angel Alita Deluxe Complete Series Box Set

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Battle Angel Alita Deluxe Complete Series Box Set Hardcover – December 18, 2018

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Print length 2392 pages
Language English
Publisher Kodansha Comics
Publication date December 18, 2018
Reading age 16 years and up
Dimensions 7.36 x 6.14 x 10.5 inches
ISBN-10 1632367114
ISBN-13 978-1632367112
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Battle Angel Alita 2 (Paperback) (Battle Angel Alita (Paperback))

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battle angel alita complete deluxe edition manga box set gift

A complete Alita library in one box!

The perfect gift for fans of the hit film or the classic manga! This premium collector's box set contains the entire original Battle Angel Alita manga series in five beautiful, large-sized hardcover volumes, plus the newly-published collection of short stories, never seen in English before, and three art cards.

The ultimate holiday gift for fans of the manga and film

Editorial reviews, about the author, product details.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Kodansha Comics; Deluxe edition (December 18, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 2392 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1632367114
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1632367112
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 16 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.6 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.36 x 6.14 x 10.5 inches
#336 in Science Fiction Manga (Books)
#521 in Media Tie-In Manga (Books)

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Yukito kishiro.

When he was only seventeen, Yukito Kishiro was nominated for Japanese publisher Shogakukan's Best New Comic award. Creator of other popular VIZ Media series Aqua Knight, Ashen Victor, and Battle Angel Alita, Kishiro is known for his strong characters, original settings, and intricate, lifelike artwork.

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Movie Review: Alita: Battle Angel ⋆
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COMMENTS

Alita: Battle Angel movie review (2019)
With so much background and story to cover, maybe "Alita" would have benefitted from a "less is more" approach. But considering its estimated budget of $200 million, "Alita: Battle Angel" is an awe-inspiring jump for the man who first burst onto the film scene with a movie that cost around $7,000. The visual bonanza cooked up by ...
Alita: Battle Angel
Movie Info. Set several centuries in the future, the abandoned Alita is found in the scrapyard of Iron City by Ido, a compassionate cyber-doctor who takes the unconscious cyborg Alita to his ...
Alita: Battle Angel Review
There's enough story in Alita: Battle Angel to fill several movies. Over the course of just one film, Alita investigates a serial killer, becomes a bounty hunter, falls in love, joins a deadly ...
Alita: Battle Angel
Alita: Battle Angel is a tonally chaotic mess. Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4.0 | Sep 1, 2020. Matt Cipolla Film Monthly. Alita's problems overflow when the action tapers, and a lot of this ...
'Alita: Battle Angel' Review
Alita: Battle Angel is a whole heck of a lot of movie, a two-hour dive into a dense cyber-punk dystopia filled with cyborg bounty hunters, deadly roller-skate-based extreme sports, and the ...
'Alita: Battle Angel' Review
'Alita: Battle Angel': Film Review. Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron worked with Peter Jackson's visual effects wizards on this long-gestating manga-based action thriller 'Alita: Battle Angel.'
Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
8/10. Great. masonsaul 9 February 2019. The ending is weak and focused on setting up the sequel and Mahershala Ali is underutilized but Alita: Battle Angel is still the best anime adaptation yet. It has incredible visuals and thrilling action sequences and two great performances from Rosa Salazar and Christoph Waltz.
Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
Alita: Battle Angel: Directed by Robert Rodriguez. With Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali. A deactivated cyborg's revived, but can't remember anything of her past and goes on a quest to find out who she is.
Alita: Battle Angel
Movie Review. Blink. She wakes up in a strange bed, in a strange place. She has no memory of who she is. Oh, she's a cyborg, of course. ... Alita: Battle Angel is visually spectacular, often ridiculous and sometimes kinda fun. Based on a 1990 manga series called Gunnm written by Yukito Kishiro, the film offers a dizzying, if overly long ...
Alita: Battle Angel
Sci-Fi. Thriller. Directed By: Robert Rodriguez. Written By: James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis, Yukito Kishiro. Alita: Battle Angel. Metascore Mixed or Average Based on 49 Critic Reviews. 53. User Score Universal Acclaim Based on 2,157 User Ratings. 8.5.
'Alita: Battle Angel' Review: A Cyberheroine Story Way Past Its Sell-By
A female cyborg warrior has spent the past 300 years broken and lifeless in a garbage dump, a remnant of an apocalyptic war (don't ask) that has wrecked the crowded urban landscape known as Iron ...
Alita: Battle Angel review
Alita: Battle Angel is based on the Japanese manga series Gunnm by Yukito Kishiro and like the remake of Ghost in the Shell it has been the subject of whitewashing complaints.Well, the original is ...
Alita: Battle Angel Review: Stunning, Melt Your Eyeballs 3D Action
Alita: Battle Angel is a special effects marvel that raises the 3D bar. The long awaited film adaptation of Yukito Kishiro's hit Japanese manga has melt your eyeballs, stunning action scenes. The ...
Alita: Battle Angel review
Alita: Battle Angel review - Dystopian sci-fi movie produced by James Cameron lacks the emotional pull of Titanic or Avatar ... Pauline Kael thought that the basic appeal of movies was the ...
Alita: Battle Angel Movie Review
Ultimately, Alita: Battle Angel does have a decent enough story and script - though there are moments of almost unbearably clunky dialogue that even this all-star cast can't make work. However, the true star of the movie isn't the writing or any of the performances, it's the visuals. To the filmmakers' credit, the visuals are absolutely ...
Alita: Battle Angel Review
Alita: Battle Angel. James Cameron is a filmmaker who's never failed to surprise us. He gave Alien a kick-ass war-movie sequel and turned an over-budget sinking-ship romance into history's ...
'Alita: Battle Angel' Review: Do Female Cyborgs Dream of Breasts?
By Manohla Dargis. Feb. 12, 2019. At one point in "Alita: Battle Angel" — another dystopian fantasy that reminds you of just how visionary the original "Blade Runner" was — the cyborg ...
'Alita: Battle Angel' Review: Ungainly and Kinda Charming
A review of 'Alita: Battle Angel': The only reason any of this movie works at all is Rosa Salazar and, I hate to say it, those goddamned big eyes.
Alita: Battle Angel Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 81 ): Kids say ( 65 ): This juggernaut-sized sci-fi movie mechanically rehashes a huge collection of genre clichés while bashing its way through an onslaught of visual effects, bad dialogue, and dull, lifeless characters. Co-written by James Cameron and directed by Robert Rodriguez, Alita: Battle Angel feels lost in a ...
Alita: Battle Angel
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ChrisStuckmannChris Stuckmann reviews Alita: Battle Angel, starring Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Mahers...
Alita: Battle Angel
Alita: Battle Angel is a 2019 American cyberpunk action film based on Yukito Kishiro's manga series Gunnm (or Battle Angel Alita in English). It was directed by Robert Rodriguez, produced by James Cameron and Jon Landau, and written by Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis. Rosa Salazar stars through motion-capture animation as Alita, a cyborg who awakens in a new body without memory of her past and ...
Alita: Battle Angel
Alita: Battle Angel (United States, 2019) February 12, 2019 A movie review by James Berardinelli On the one hand, it's possible to express deep admiration for the world-building and storytelling of Alita: Battle Angel and to offer praise and credit to director Robert Rodriguez and co-writer/co-producer James Cameron for providing a riveting ...
ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL
ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL has impressive special effects and thrilling action sequences that will entertain science fiction fans. However, the story is too complicated, making the movie seem longer than it is. Happily, though, it has a strong Christian worldview about fighting evil and injustice. At one point, Alita and her new friend Hugo find ...
10 Best Junkie XL Movie Scores, Ranked
Directed by Robert Rodriguez and produced by James Cameron, Alita: Battle Angel is set in a dystopian future where cyborgs and humans coexist. The story follows Alita, a cyborg with no memory of ...
Battle Angel Alita Deluxe Complete Series Box Set
A complete Alita library in one box! The perfect gift for fans of the hit film or the classic manga! This premium collector's box set contains the entire original Battle Angel Alita manga series in five beautiful, large-sized hardcover volumes, plus the newly-published collection of short stories, never seen in English before, and three art cards.

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