Alita: Battle Angel Reviews - All Bark, No Bite
The real-life adaptation of an iconic cyberpunk manga from the 90’s turned out how most live-action manga adaptations usually do.
First reviews of Alita: Battle Angel, the real-live adaptation of Yukito Kishiro's iconic cyberpunk manga., are in. Unfortunately, it seems that the super production by James Cameron and Jon Landau with Robert Rodriguez at the helm will not satisfy the fans of more ambitious science fiction – the critical reception of the film was rather cold.
At the time of writing this news only 37% out of 19 reviews published on Rotten Tomatoes have rated Alita positively. The situation on Metacritic doesn’t look much better, where the film’s Metascore score based on 11 reviews is only 50 points out of 100 possible.
According to critics, the adaptation completely abandoned the character depth present in its prototype and philosophical debate typical of cyberpunk works in favour of action scenes overloaded with special effects and a script that tries to catch too many birds by the tail. A reviewer on TheWrap had summarized the film as follows:
The film is stuffed with so many plot strands and so many different genres (sports movie, YA rebellion movie, bounty-hunter movie) that it never gets moving.
The summary of Alita that we can read on The Guardian website is also not very optimistic:
Alita: Battle Angel is a film with Imax spectacle and big effects. But for all its scale, it might end up being put on for 13-year-olds as a sleepover entertainment. It doesn’t have the grownup, challenging, complicated ideas of Ghost in the Shell.
So it seems that if you are someone thirsting for simple, spctacular entertainment, you might just be satisfied with what Alita has to offer, but if you were hoping to see any ambitious content, you will come out of the cinema severely disappointed.
