Alita:Battle Angel (Dir Robert Rodriguez, 2h 22m)

Who would have thought, at the end of the road of terrible Western anime adaptions, from the just bad (Death Note, The Guyver) to the downright diabolical (DragonBall Evolution), stood Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron's adaption of Yukito Kishiro's 1980s manga, Ganmu, better known via its westernised title of Battle Angel Alita. A passion project for Cameron for many years, going back to the turn of the century, in the hands of Robert Rodriguez, already a veteran of not only adapting stylised and ultra-violent comics (Sin City), but in bringing soul to digital heavy films, Alita is something of a minor miracle. It's an anime film that's not just a faithful adaption, but a well crafted and breakneck adventure in which a young teenage cyborg has to find her purpose, her identity and survive a hostile world in which the strong subjugate the weak.

In the aftermath of a war between Earth and Mars, in which civilisation has collapsed, with the exception of the city Zalem, with Doc (Christopher Waltz), finding what remains of Alita in the scrapyard, Iron Town, that forms under Zalem's garbage disposal. Having lost her memory, Alita, as she is soon dubbed by Doc, slowly regains her confidence, forming a close friendship with Hugo (Keenan Johnson), a junker who, much like the rest of Iron City one day dreams of escaping the slums and reaching the luxury of Zalem above. 

Through him, she learns to play the ultra-violent game, Motorball, a mechanised death-game where only the strongest cyborgs win, and where the eventual winner gains access to Zalem, and, uncovering what Doc really does, begins to cut her own path through the city, as a Hunter-Warrior, a ruthless group of bounty hunters, defeating two of them and making an enemy of the underworld enforcer Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley), whilst Doc's former wife, together with Vector, a shadowy figure who runs Motorball, begins to plot how to use the sport to bring them more weapons and warriors via Hugo and his scrapper gang.

With Alita beginning to realise, through her fighting style, a brief flashback of her past, and from the discovery a cybernetic body that she finds in a crashed Martian ship, that there is more to her existence than she realises, so she begins to gain confidence as a warrior, despite Doc's refusal to let her use the body, which he eventually identifies as a berserker. However, when she is defeated by Grewishka, in a bruising fight that leaves both of their bodies badly broken, so Doc is forced to turn to it, and thus Alita's power only grows, placing her on a collision course with not only the forces from Zalem, but also Vector,, and acts as Grewishka's boss, who wants nothing more than Alita dead, and in which Alita fully reaches her potential as a warrior and a person.

In Rosa Salazar, Cameron and Rodriguez have undoubtedly found a perfect match for Alita, not only in her strong physical resemblance to the character-and to the credit of the effects team, the manga-ish eyes in context, rather than still screenshots is a nigh-flawless effect, that not only matches the expressiveness of the manga style in a way that twins Japanese and Western visual styles, but captures the uncanny, more human-than-human sense of what Alita is. Moreover, Salazar brings Alita's warrior-in-a-teenage-body duality perfectly to life, as both a tough and resourceful warrior, and a surprisingly visually fragile young woman, often towered over by other warriors, and a girl who is still, for most of the film, is still finding her way in the world, including with her relationship with Hugo.

The other star is undoubtedly the world itself-it would be easy for this to look like any other post apocalyptic world, but there is a uniqueness to the world, with its run-down and ramshackle look, of shantyish buildings among older, ruined buildings, not to mention the ever-present and looming form of Zalem in the sky above, the look of the individual buildings, from Doc's far-eastern looking sets of rooms to Hugo's cluttered rooms, to the suite lived in by Vector. Not only that but the world looks lived in, culturally distinct, and the creativity of the designs for all of the cyborgs makes each uinique and interesting to look at, most notably the heavily cyborgised Hunter Warriors, whose designs are some of the best in the entire film, most notably in their defacto leader, Zapan (an enjoyably crazy Ed Skein who now seems destined to play psychopathic warriors), whose samurai-style appearance is intricate and covered with engraved metal plates.

The rest of the cast is superb-the connection between Doc and Alita is strong, with Doc treating her as a surrogate daughter, and clearly caring for her, even after her identity is revealed, showing true concern in her safety, even if she is more than capable of holding her own as a warrior and a person. Her relationship with Hugo, meanwhile, is a well crafted, and believable romance, and Hugo is a well rounded character, and perhaps the best example of the moral greyness of the world, in which he must survive whilst striving for his dream to reach Zalem, and through this, there is a sense of everyone but Alita having been corrupted to some extent by the world, only adding to her very light and dark view of the world, culminating in a heartbreaking choice she has to make.

But at the heart of the film is undoubtedly its message. And it is arguably in Alita grasping this message that the film is thus successful-Alita is a film about identity, as many of the great cyberpunk works are, and in Alita finding her purpose, beginning to recover herself and in embracing what she is that she becomes the warrior she was born, and created to be. Rodriguez nails this perfectly with several scenes in which Alita embraces her existence, embraces that she is not fully human, but can feel and love and cry and feel pain like a human, that she is a warrior who will defend the weak from the strong. Though this comes in the form of a sequence that acts as a shameless sequel hook, in which Alita sets herself against the forces of Zalem. In the hands of a lesser director, someone without the story-telling abilities of Rodriguez and Cameron, this would almost certainly have been muted, would have lost the key theme of Kishiro's manga-that being human or not-human does not matter in the end, but what one does with it.

Thus, Alita: Battle Angel feels like something of a  first-an anime adaption that captures not just the spirit but the fun of a manga and anime in a way that few other works have before. Through Rodriguez and Cameron, both clearly creators with a love of anime and manga that shines through, live action anime adaptions are no longer purely a joke to beat a Hollywood bereft of ideas but as bonafide as any adaption of any western comic. Alita soars.

Rating: Highly Recommended