film

Boring machine

Alita: Battle Angel is a project that’s been on James Cameron’s plate for what seems like forever. I can’t remember the first time I saw him attached to the project, but I know it was a long time ago.

Then, the whole Avatar thing happened, and Cameron the director got lost in Pandora speaking Navi and doing strange things with horse-like creatures. He went from directing Alita, to providing screenplay and producing contributions only.

Directing chores went to Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, From Dusk Till Dawn) and now, after some substantial delays, the movie has finally arrived.

The first time I saw the actual character of Alita in previews (played, in motion captures, by Rosa Salazar), I found her super creepy with her big eyes and ghostly smile. After seeing her in 3D IMAX I have to say, something about adding that third dimension makes her more visually accessible. She really is an impressive special effects feat, blending in just fine with the 100 percent human actors and special effects backdrops.

The movie itself is rather absorbing for a while, a decent story about a more than 300-year-old android trying to fit into a dystopian society, along with having the dullest boyfriend in cinematic history (Keean Johnson). The convoluted plot has something to do with her amnesiac-self trying to remember her battle machine origins (interesting) and trying to become a killer roller derby superstar (not so interesting).

Looking through a garbage heap (that looks uncannily like the garbage heaps from Idiocracy, a film Robert Rodriguez did the special effects for), Dr. Dyson Ido (a superb Christoph Waltz) finds the upper half of a strikingly beautiful android. He takes some readings, discovers she still has brain activity, and takes her on home. He meshes her upper parts with a robot body he has lying around, one that was intended for his late daughter. He brings the android back to life, dubs her Alita (his deceased daughter’s name) and starts feeding her oranges.

Alita can’t remember a god damned thing, but it all comes back to her in flashes. She’s a big time, former warrior so, naturally, her talents will take her towards a career in killer roller derbies. That’s where the movie really starts to lose it. It’s an interesting movie about a young girl in an old android’s body looking for her sense of self, and even becoming a bounty hunter. Then, in a snap decision, she decides to go for fame and money in roller derby. Huh?

It’s as if the film has no idea where to go. It’s based on an original graphic novel that probably birthed the roller derby angle, but that’s an element Rodriguez and Cameron could’ve easily jettisoned. It comes off as a tech geek’s kind of Quidditch, a lame attempt to instill the Harry Potter universe in the world of Alita. Every second of this movie where Alita is skating around feels like a distraction.

There are many other killer cyborg characters with familiar faces on them, including Jackie Earle Haley, Jai Courtney, Jeff Fahey and Casper Van Dien. The cyborg characters are pulled off with varying degrees of success, from impressive (Haley) to downright silly looking (Courtney). While Alita herself is a surprisingly well integrated figure visually, some of the other characters come off as badly cartoonish.

Another subplot involving persons named Vector and Chiren (Mahershala Ali and Jennifer Connelly) is supposed to provide the film with two super villains, but I never really got a handle on what the pair was actually doing. Thus, they weren’t very scary.

Now that Cameron’s little Alita diversion is out of the way, he can get back to dawdling with his funky Smurfs in Pandora for future boring installments of his CGI wasteland. Alita: Battle Angel ultimately feels like a decent idea that didn’t get his full attention in the end. Ω

“They already know you’re a robot, you don’t have to do the dance, too!”

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2Cold Pursuit Cold Pursuit sees Liam Neeson in another tired revenge formula film, this time set in the snowy Rocky Mountains. It allows for some impressive scenery. That’s about the best thing I can say for this one. It’s not a good thing when the best part of a murder mystery is shots of a snow plow cutting through large quantities of white stuff. That, oddly enough, is a beautiful thing to watch and had me wishing this was a documentary about a guy trying to keep a mountain pass clear in the winter rather than another Fargo rip-off. Neeson plays Nels Coxman and, yes, the film contains plenty of jokes about that last name. Nels has just won citizen of the year for keeping the roads clear, just in time for his son Kyle (Michael Richardson) to be killed by a criminally forced heroin overdose. Turns out Kyle interfered in some drug dealings with a major dealer nicknamed Viking (Tom Bateman) and got put in a fatal predicament made to look like an addict’s accident. Nels knows better and seeks out answers. When he starts getting them, he kills off those responsible, one by one, until the path leads to Viking. When he gets there, the plan involves Viking’s young son. (“You took my son’s life. You have a son. He’s going to be taken!”) What follows is a revenge thriller that thinks it’s funny and clever, but it’s not.

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2Happy Death Day 2U Christopher Landon follows up his somewhat creative original with an overly ambitious sequel that starts off fantastically but gets lost in its second half. Jessica Rothe returns as Tree, the college student who got stuck in the Groundhog Day murder loop in the original. The sequel starts with Ryan (Phi Vu), the character who walked in on Tree and Carter (Israel Broussard) stuck in a brand new murder loop with a seemingly different baby mask killer. Landon and friends go crazy, establishing a reason for the whole murder loop thing (a quantum physics experiment) and setting up some scenarios that openly acknowledge the plot of Back to the Future 2, featuring doppelgangers and everything. So far so good—but then the plot goes Tree-centric again and becomes about her fixing other elements of her life, leaning hard on emotional stuff rather than the totally clever gimmicks the film presents in the first half. In fact, the movie basically ignores the doppelganger element and drops it completely, becoming just another murder mystery that feels like a bad Scream sequel. It’s too bad. At one point, I was looking at this movie as one of the greater sequel ideas I had ever witnessed. Landon squanders that idea and ultimately delivers a movie that feels like a copout.

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