Good Live-Action Anime? Alita: Battle Angel (2019) Review

Directed by: Robert Rodriguez
Written by: Robert Rodriguez, James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis
Starring: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Keean Johnson
IMDb Link

Live-action anime movies are generally pretty terrible; from Dragonball Evolution to Fullmetal Alchemist to Death Note, these movies have ranged from utterly painful to almost passable, and never anything more than that. With that in mind, when I say that Alita: Battle Angel, is actually quite good, you understand by what it compares to how monumental a success that it was even good at all.

The story follows Alita, a cyborg woman discovered in a scrap heap and revived, only to find that she has no memory of her past life. In the dystopian slum that is her new home, she must discover who she is amid the cyberpunk bounty hunters, Robocop patrol robots, and fast-paced metal death games that make up her home.

As a piece of pure, unadulterated action, this movie is pulse-poundingly excellent. The action is relentless when it happens; a fight kicks off with a moment of slow motion before launching in to an all-out cyborg brawl that at once tries to illicit the idea of pure chaos and tries to anchor you to moments of comedy and heroism between swaths of pure mechanical violence, and death races are treated as fun past-times where getting your metal body shredded  to pieces is just part of the fun and then juxtaposed between the very real implications of such an event and what it says about the world, as well as complete change of pace and perspective when Alita herself jumps on to the track. Because it's all metal, the film just lets the violence explode on-screen without a need to worry about it feeling real, and as a result the ebb and flow of fights aren't constantly cutting to avoid showing the consequences of the violence. Everything about the action packs a punch.

In terms of story, the thing that makes this worthwhile is the wonderful title character. It's a fairly generic and straightforward plot that seems to pack in as many tropes as it can until it's almost bursting at the seams, rising and falling so many times that the movie feels a little out of breath by the end, but even as interest in the world and other characters begin to falter, Alita remains as an effective through-line for each and every story beat, literally holding the movie together with her insanely strong cyborg heart. For every moment where the movie feels the need to flatly explain the extended details of the world and lore, we get a sweet character moment where Alita wins the hearts of every dog lover in the world, showing her total purity and naivete without someone needing to point it out. Even the moments where this didactic childlike approach to doing right at all times could potentially feel trite ultimately work, largely because the film is self-aware enough to challenge and trial her worldview, and most importantly because of the heart-achingly honest mo-cap performance of Rosa Salazar. I can't imagine this will be the same for everyone, but I found that the the mo-cap animation was relatively seamless (at least for the sake of suspension of disbelief), and that even if it hadn't been, the approach Salazar took to the character made her the source of strength the movie needed her to be. Every line, no matter how cliche or potentially clunky, it delivered with the utmost certainty, selling you on the idea that Alita at least believes in what she says, no matter how ridiculous it might sound, even in-universe. She's passionate, and commanding, and a little bit flippant, and of these aspects are challenged over and over in such a way that no character step feels unearned. As a movie about Alita, Alita is a success.

This extends to much of what is immediately in proximity to Alita. Chrisoph Waltz is appropriately stern yet soft as surrogate father Dr. Ido, and the interplay of their relationship, while fairly predictable, is also filled with such genuine warmth that the lack of originality doesn't matter. A scene where Ido, having learned to let Alita go, tries his best to support her and stifles his own protective nature for her sake, and her newfound understanding of such an action is made sublime by the exchange between the two, the spoken and unspoken words, their expressions, it's all so surprisingly real in this high-octane movie where robots smash each other for spectacle.

That said, not everything else is quite as strong. Alita's love interest Hugo, while occasionally appearing as more than the broad archetype he was set up as, is performed only serviceably by Keean Johnson, never standing out in a way that makes the character particularly interesting and only worthwhile as he stands in relation to Alita; his worth as a character is entirely in how his existence challenges and re-defines how Alita thinks, and that's fine, but nothing more. Likewise, lore and story that don't directly relate to Alita  are relatively uninteresting because they only get delivered through clunky dialogue that feels like its trying to pretend that it's not relevant to the plot even though the only reason it's brought up is because it eventually will be. Again, it's not bad, but it means any scene that doesn't involve a step forward for Alita is just sort of plain. Still, I didn't find it to be enough to detract from the movie so much that I didn't enjoy it, but the good parts were so comparably good that these slower moments that felt like they should have had more poignancy about the world simply didn't, and it stood out against the action and the character moments.

The Short Version: Alita's ambition shines when the film revels in its incredible action scenes or explores the pure nature of its title character, but it isn't exempt from the trappings of a bland romance, clunky dialogue, and structure-warping lore.

Rating: 7/10

Published February 17th, 2019

Vice is Not Nice - 2019 Film Review

Directed by: Adam McKay
Written by: Adam McKay
Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell
IMDb Link

Vice has all the wit and timing of Cheney himself. For all its prestige actors and quirky ideas, the film is too often disengaging to the point of boredom, explaining every detail as laboriously as possible, and blaming the audience if they don't find it interesting.

The story follows many of the important beats in the life of former Vice President Dick Cheney (Bale), from his wild college years to constant ladder-climbing to his personal conflict being a Republican with a lesbian daughter, and capping off with his (to put it mildly) controversial work during the Bush administration. All of this is expressed through a particularly idiosyncratic lens by director Adam McKay, who tries to make the jump from a deliberately cliche presentation of his early years as a mixed bag but ultimately positive, even stepping in to full-on parody when it rolls credits over a happy ending half-way through the film, before the call from the Bush administration turns the movie in to an increasingly absurd attempt to remind people of just how cartoonishly evil he could be. It's an essentially noble idea, exposing the worst of a former administration in an effort to suggest why America has what it has now, but the film never goes beyond a very surface-level critique of those problems, bloviating endlessly about them but never offering more than a condemnation of the audience as a solution. The film seems to want to show the endless details in as tired a manner as possible to bore the audience to tears, then have a go at the audience for not paying attention to the political evil that went on, watching mindless action movies instead of "important" movies like Vice.

With that said, I don't buy that the boredom was intentional, even if the condemnation was. The film often delves in to a territory that could broadly be called "comedy", but so much of its schtick is as mind-numbing as its lecturing, and seemingly without point. Cheney orders Guantanamo torture techniques off of a menu in a restaurant, because creating absurdity through contrast is the only string to this movie's bow and it's going to try and play it in as many ways as it can. Any time the film doesn't throw an odd cutaway like this in the middle of a montage in an attempt to use The Big Short's leftovers, it turns obvious satire it never knows when to cut short. We can't know what was actually going through Dick and Lynne's minds as they pondered the offer of Vice-Presidency because people don't expose their thoughts through dialogue like they're in a Shakespearean play, so let's have a scene where Dick and Lynne Cheney expose their thoughts through dialogue like they're in a Shakespearean play, because nothing says "we have contempt for our audience" like turning an idea that would have been funny for about ten seconds in to an agonising minutes-long scene. Stuff like this both downplays the importance of what it's trying to explore and excludes the very audience it seeks to show that same importance to, which in turn clashes with the film's attempts to highlight just how absurdly, disturbingly evil the man's actions could be. The film wants very much for us to understand that Dick Cheney was a terrible person (shocking revelation, I know), but any attempts to explore the roots of what makes that sort of man are ultimately thrown by the wayside in its efforts to make every caricature involves behave increasingly arch.

There is more to these scenes thanks to performances from a cast of extremely talented actors. Bale exudes intensity as easily as breathing, which is par for the course with his career but nevertheless impressive, especially under the exceptional make-up work. The man is an inscrutable abyss, an unassuming yet undeniably powerful presence that carries the movie so hard it often leaves him weak of heart. Adams is similarly appropriate as Lynne at the best of times, the powerful woman behind the powerful man that convincingly pushes them to a place of absolute power. The other standout is Carell as Donald Rumsfeld; it's a cartoonish take that some will surely dislike, but he's the one who person who doesn't need "clever" juxtaposition through editing to be offensively funny. He's the one prominent comedic character in this supposed comedy, and his contrast with Bale is exactly the sort of dissonance for the sake of a few laughs that the movie goes for that actually works.

The Short Version: Vice is too caught up in its own self-importance and too critical of its own audience. So much of the film is a slog to get through because it painstakingly lectures the audience on plenty of details that are already common knowledge, without really adding any new insight, and any joke the film attempts to alleviate the boredom is so long-winded that it only adds to it. There's some slick performances and a good core idea on display, but it's not enough to elevate this experience beyond middling at best.

Rating: 5/10

Published February 10th, 2019