Rob’s review published on Letterboxd:
Watching Videodrome put me in the mood for some cyberpunk. Maybe I should've grabbed the Strange Days DVD off the shelf (Where's my anamorphic Blu-Ray, Lightstorm?).
I never read the manga this was based on, so I'm gonna take this movie on its own merits, unlike a lot of comic-based properties.
Okay, Alita is a teenage girl who is also a robotic killing machine that happens to be 300 years old. She likes rollerblading, cute boys, and tactical unarmed combat.
Robert Rodriguez gave himself a job of work on this. Yeah, he's done a comic adaptation before, but Sin City was different. Everyone knows hard boiled crime stories, and it's not hard to add in some ninjas and killer hookers and have people keep up.
With Alita, he's gotta build a much larger world, with a lot more going on, and frankly, it's not the easiest to follow, even for this old comic and sci-fi geek.
We've got our standard upper city of the rich folk and under city of regular people from almost every sci-fi story since The Time Machine. There's a three hundred year old war with aliens or some shit, and no cops for some reason, and there's some dude who runs rollerball, and oh Jesus, this is The Hunger Games with cyborgs, isn't it?
Yeah, that's pretty much what it is. The fact that she's an amnesiac with a battle tank for a body excuses the Mary Sue tendencies just like any other superpowered adolescent power fantasy, so it's fine. But the whole "lone teen who saves the world" angle of a story like this is something I kinda aged out of a while back.
Huh, now she's fighting a bunch of ED-209s with a lightsaber. There's something you only see in every junior high school boy's notebook in 1987.
So anyway, the movie doesn't really have a proper ending because it's loaded sequel bait, which I would've thought was beneath screenwriter James Cameron, but then again, stealing the emotional climax from Titanic for this movie wasn't beneath him, so what do I know? Maybe now that he's done fucking around with Alita Battle Angel, he'll have time to work on the Strange Days Blu-Ray.
This was filled with impressive visuals, and it was fun enough, but I don't think I was really the target audience for it. If I decide I want to see what happens between Alita and Nova, I'll pick up the manga at Newbury Comics.