The father (Christoph Waltz) is already waiting at the dining table, as the teenage daughter (Rosa Salazar) finally gets out of bed and sits down slightly dazed to him. A first bite of an orange arouses their spirits, with new energy, the girl asks a question to the father: "Should I actually know who you are?"
Manga fans will know who the girl is: Alita, the cyborg fighter from Yukito Kishiro's acclaimed series "GUNNM". Movie fans, on the other hand, will know who the fathers are: James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez. The former wrote the screenplay, directed the latter. Already planned since 2003, Cameron was supposed to stage "Alita" as well. But then he preferred to focus on "Avatar" and let the skilled comic adapter Rodriguez ("Sin City") take over.
He already mounted a machine gun to the leg stump in "Planet Terror", a gogo dancer, and had them zombie the ball. The man-machines in "Alita", above all the title heroine, is slaughtered in a similar brutal way, slaughtering where she has the opportunity to do so. And Iron City offers her often.
In the video: Robert Rodriguez explains a scene from "Alita: Battle Angel"
20th Century Fox
In the dystopian metropolis, the legal and social states have collapsed. Instead of the police bounty hunters take on the hunt for criminals, but sometimes cyborgs are also taken apart because the bounty hunters like their spare parts.
Alone on the island of Salem, which literally hovers over Iron City, there is still abundance and peace. But she may only enter who has already been born on her - or who can compete in the popular sport of motorballs, a kind of sculler death with risk of death.
Like the "Hunger Games" from the "Tributes of Panem," Motorball is a brutal mass suit that is designed to distract the residents of Iron City from their misery. And somehow in Alita is also a Katniss Everdeen, who wants to force the two-class system with their will to fight to their knees.
"Alita: Battle Angel"
USA 2019
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Book: James Cameron, Laete Kalogridis
Performers: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Keean Johnson, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali
Production: 20th Century Fox, Lightstorm Entertainment et al.
Distribution: 20th Century Fox
Length: 122 minutes
FSK: from 12 years
Start: 14th February 2019
But for the psychological fine drawing of the figure, which would make Alita more than a fighter in the striped pullover, the film lacks calmness and accuracy. Again and again he starts to tell the father-daughter-drama, which is next to a coming-of-age and a love story even in him - and then only comes in a fight scene.
But Alita has the potential to be everything at once, brutal, empathetic, unpredictable, dramatic. After all, her very creation is an act of merging: from a head, including a human brain, which he discovered on a scrap heap, and an electric body, she has her "father," the electric inventor. Ido, assembled.
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"Alita: Battle Angel": are so big eyesMore empathic filmmakers than Cameron and Rodriguez would have worked out the beautiful adolescent metaphor contained in this constellation. Finally, alita alienates like a teenager with her new body, has to first discover and accept his special abilities. They would also have savored the humor in scenes such as the dining table scene, where "father" and "daughter" meet each other like strangers. And they could have conveyed the shock that the "father" feels when he realizes that there is a deadly fighting machine in "his" girl.
All this is dispensed with "Alita" - one could almost say: in favor of the fight scenes. But ultimately, they also suffer from the fact that they have no psychological relining and always provide only spectacle instead of feeling.
If that is enough, the end will be pleased. Then the perspective on a franchise is opened. Purely narrative acts of the battle angel Alita but already exhausted with this movie.