Perhaps the tired, manufactured template-filmmaking of the MCU that has dominated much of Hollywood Blockbuster cinema over the last decade played a factor in my experience with Alita: Battle Angel, with the homogeneous aesthetic that runs through them being a major aspect of my frustration. Let me start off by saying, Alita: Battle Angel is far from perfect, having quite a few relatively objective flaws related to narrative storytelling and a few cringeworthy bits of dialogue, yet while watching it I felt rejuvenated in a sense, with Rodriguez, Cameron and company delivering a visual spectacle that effectively transports the viewer to a wholly different world, and I was oh so game for this ride. Battle Angel is an extremely tight, maybe too so, fast-paced experience, one which moves along with such speed that it never shows much of desire for exposition. This is highly efficient economic filmmaking by Rodriguez, and paired with Cameron's FX, the film delivers what it promises. While it's clearly built for a sequel, the film stood alone for me in its ability to deliver visual spectacle and dynamic action, which is exactly what I want out of my escapism, with the film disrupting my personal temporal and spatial awareness with its world-building. For all the flaws I've listed above, the emotional core of the hero's journey worked, with Alita as a character being someone the audience finds themselves rooting for, a character whose naivety, general trustworthiness, and optimism are perfectly juxtaposed against what she was designed to be - the ultimate killing machine. When it comes to big-budget sci-fi escapism, Alita: Battle Angel did more for me than most films, and while I'm not familiar with the source material, this film made me want to seek it out, which in a sense, is quite the compliment by today's standards, given how much cinema in Hollywood is regulated to a secondary medium of storytelling.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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