ALITA BATTLE ANGEL (2019) >
I had no idea what Alita was at first glance.
I never saw the trailer or knew it was based on an anime from the 90s until recently. My first thought was it must be another animated film. I only caught a glimpse of the main character so figured the entire film was like that but I was wrong.
Now there’s a lot I could say but one thing I will say is I liked it. There were parts I didn’t care for (the love affair between Yugo and Alita was a bit too much for my blood) and there were others that kept me interested. One of the things I noticed later was her similarities to other characters.
She’s a cyborg with advanced fighting skills but lacks any memory about why, who she is or where she came from. That aspect pulled me in more. But if anyone ever saw The Bourne Identity or the reboot of Total Recall then the similarities I spoke of earlier are fairly obvious. Each possessed a certain level of skill in combat but had a lapse in their memory. It was that hero, revolutionary kind of archetype at play here.
Where Alita differs is she’s a cyborg in a far distant time and world divided between a mysterious land of power and a hell of an existence for those below. It’s most certainly a dystopian tale the more one dives in. Those that live underneath the city live like those people in Elysium who look up high and see a place they could only dream of, let alone reach.
Now where it starts to catch my interest is when Alita discovered her skills in combat and slowly starts remembering bits of her past. She ends up fighting a battle and losing the body Dr. Dyson Ido had made. He was like her father, a symbol of a protector. It was at this point we see him give in and install the URM suit she found.
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As far as the ending, there needs to be a sequel because we finally caught wind of the bad guy. He would normally tap into people’s minds and speak through them at will, but we see him in the end and around the time Alita places her sword in the air toward Zalem.
Before I say anything else though, there’s one more thing about Alita I liked and that was Rosa Salazar as the voice of the character. She was good in the Maze Runner series and the main reason I thought to see what this film was all about. And I can’t forget to touch on the anime titled Gunnm neither.
I think I came across it by accident because as I said earlier I had no clue it was based on anything. But like any sane person who finds anime appealing, I started looking for it online and to see how the original story was told. To my surprise, it’s not too different from the adaptation. The anime is definitely more graphic but for what it’s worth I thought it was dope!
There’s plenty of differences and minor deviations between the two. For instance, the adaptation tells you more about the story like the war Alita (or Gally) fought in and how the world came to be, but it most importantly shows where the URM suit came from.
How the story plays out overall is pretty much the same though. There’s still the great mystery behind Zalem and why it’s so desired, especially by Yugo. He’s one who literally spent his life trying to get there. Talk about a lost cause. His entire motivation was going to this place, thinking it would be his salvation when in reality it was all a scam. A scam pulled by the very place he stole from others to experience, where the apparent rulers maintain a slavish-like relationship with the city and people underneath it.
It’s likely just as horrible of a place to live yet it’s sold as the land of milk and honey. Reminds me of that one Black Mirror episode, Fifteen Million Merits.
The last thing I’ll say is the rosy sort of picture painted in Alita wasn’t as it seemed in Gunnm. The latter had a heavier tone that didn’t end off on a good note like the former. In Alita, it gave some sense of vengeance expressed by Alita’s mourning of Yugo. A vengeance she would swear to take out on Zalem.
