Alita Battle-Angel

A friend of mine is a connoisseur of "come from behind" fight scenes.  These are scenes in which a character is assaulted, almost beaten to death, but, then, rallies to defeat his enemy.  The granddaddy and progenitor of this kind of fight scene occurs in Shane when the ranchers almost kill Van Helfin's sodbuster before Alan Ladd intervenes wielding an axe-handle.  The best sequence of this sort in modern memory is the bloody fight between the prostitute Alabama and a hulking hoodlum played by James Gandolfini in the 1993 film True Romance.  Both of these sequences shrink into insignificance when compared with a "come from behind" fight that occurs midway through Robert Rodriguez' sci-fi film Alita Battle-Angel (2019).  Alita is a cyborg, a warrior robot, with "core operated by an anti-matter reactor strong enough to power a whole city with a million inhabitants."  At the time of the fight, Alita has huge eyes, a waif's features, and the body of pre-pubescent 13-year old girl.  Menaced by an enormous, forty-foot high battle robot, Alita takes a punch delivered by the machine's metallic, spear-pointed tentacles -- the punch smashes her robot body into about six parts:  she loses both legs, one arm, a most of her torso.  (Unlike humans hit by explosive as described in Hemingway's memorable story "A Natural History of the  Dead", robots always break along natural lines of cleavage -- that is, they come apart at the joints.)  Poor Alita is reduced to a head attached to a fragment of a torso with one operable arm.  But she is undeterred and valiantly keeps fighting, much like the unfortunate knight in the Monty Python movie -- she balances on her one good arm, uses it as a spring to shoot her high in the air, reverses direction and drops on the head of the killer robot where she proceeds to bury her fist deep in his eye, disabling the enemy.  Surely, this is the greatest "come from behind" victory in the history of cinema.

Alita Battle-Angel is derived from a Japanese battle-bot manga.  The script, which is idiotic, is said to be by James Cameron.  (Giant battling robots have been good to James Cameron.  Wikipedia reminds us that he's worth 700 million despite four divorces and made his fortune on 1984's Terminator and, then, Aliens in 1986 in which Ripley operates a towering battle robot to defeat the house-high mama monster who is defending her eggs -- "Leave her alone, Bitch!" Ripley cries out as the monster threatens a little girl, thus precipitating the Mother of all Robot versus Monster battles.)  Alita is creepy in a lot a ways and awful.  There are wonderful special effects and lots of violent, effectively directed, action but the movie is sub-literate -- it would be best shown with no dialogue and just a thunderous soundtrack of punk rock'n roll.  Christoph Waltz plays Dr. Ido, a gentle pacifist robot repairman who moonlights as a cyborg-killing vigilante at night.  (Waltz seems completely baffled by the movie, most of which presumably involved him emoting to a Green Screen -- he stands around with a dazed look on his face and seems almost inert).  Ido finds fragments of a pre-adolescent girl robot in the garbage dump -- above the city of the future, which seems modeled on the Mexico City of today, there is a vast floating metropolis called Zalem that drizzles garbage from an anal proboscis down onto the place where the characters live.  It's not certain who, if anyone lives in Zalem -- but no one is allowed to go there.  Ido reassembles the girl robot using a pre-pubescent cyborg body -- it seems his own daughter of the same age was slaughtered for some obscure reason and Ido is trying to bring the girl, or, at least, her memory back to life.  (Ido's ex-wife, who has a Hindu dot in the middle of her forehead is lounging around in black lingerie with Vector, a super-villain played by Mahershala Ali.  (Ali is the star of HBO's True Detective  this season-- in that show, he plays a cop so traumatized that he mumbles constantly in a voice so deep that you would need a seismograph to pick up what he is saying.  I'm only able to understand about one-third of his mumbled dialogue in the HBO show, most of which consists of the most dire, pessimistic declarations possible.  In this film, Ali is brash, well-spoken and you can understand everything he says -- he even seems a little cheerful in his villainy.  Accordingly, all of the dismal muttering and moaning in True Detective is apparently due to the way that show is plotted and written.)   Little Alita, who can eat like a human (query: where does the food go once it slides down her robot throat) falls in love with a local hoodlum -- this is notwithstanding the fact that her sleek robot body is as sexless as the plastic torso of a Barbie doll.  She joins her Geppetto, her Dad the kindly robot repairman and vigilante, on his midnight excursions to kick the metal asses of various murderous robots.  As previously noted, in her great "come from behind" fight, she gets completely discombobulated, disassembled totally, and, then, has her fractured body replaced by a special battle-robot rig that is far more curvaceous, has bigger breasts and a more slender waist, and that is so preternaturally powerful that she can win every fight with everyone hands down.  (Once Alita gets her rockin' super body, all suspense leaches out of the movie -- since we know she can defeat any enemy whatsoever, there's really no point to watch the last third of the film in which she flies around ripping enemy robots to shreds.)  It turns out that there's some super-scientist still living in Zalem and that he has some kind of interest in Alita.  Alita signs up for a sort of murder-version of the Roller Derby, the same game played in the old 1975 James Caan movie, Rollerball, and, of course, immediately eliminates all rivals because of her super-warrior titanium alloy, self-healing, self-regenerating body powered by her anti-matter reactor heart.  Her boyfriend, then, ascends toward the hovering city of Zalem, climbing a big garbage vent that looks like an elephant's tusk made of grey metal.  Nova, the super scientist, floating overhead wears weird goggles over his eyes.  There's a big reveal -- he yanks off his goggles and, what to our wondering eyes should appear, but the fact that Nova is none other than Ed Norton.  This reveal -- the fact that Nova who looks a little like Elton John during his glory days is actually Ed Norton is (for some inscrutable reason) the climax of the film.  The movie is stupid beyond belief, has sinister sexual overtones (what does the no-genitals Alita do with her boyfriends -- some kind of robot oral sex?), and has very good special effects and impressive action scenes.  I guess it rates 59% positive on Rotten Tomatoes and just edged out the Lego movie for top box-office gross this last week -- I saw the movie with two heads who seemed stoned out of their mind, Jack, and someone far in the back of the theater who shuffled back and forth a couple times, sniffling softly, but otherwise was silent.