Alita: Battle Angel Parent Guide

When Dr. Ido (Christoph Waltz) discovers a robotic head with an intact brain in the scrap pile below the flying city of Zalem, he takes it home and brings it to life. When she awakes, she remembers nothing, and asks Dr. Ido for a name: he calls her “Alita” (Rosa Salazar). Though she learns quickly and adapts well to her new life, Ido is worried about her headstrong nature and tendency to find trouble. However, when Alita helps him track down a fugitive killer, they both realize that there may be something bigger going on in Iron Town. With the help of her friend, junk dealer Hugo (Keean Johnson), Alita and Ido prepare to take on the biggest players in the criminal world. Will Alita be able to handle their cybernetic henchmen and keep herself in one piece? And just as importantly, will she be able to protect her friends?

Alita: Battle Angel feels kind of like a mashup between Mortal Engines and Robocop: It adopts the sprawling dystopian future from the former and replaces its steampunk aspects with the cyberpunk and cybernetic ideas from the latter. It’s not a terrible combination, and the world-building in the movie is one of its strongest points. This is partially because it doesn’t attempt Mortal Engine’s large-scale setting and keeps its focus on one city, which helps the movie feel grounded in one fully realized location. The film scores another big success with Alita, its computer enhanced protagonist. Although I went in to the theatre fearing two hours of the “uncanny valley”, I adjusted to her appearance within minutes. This is probably helped by the fact that Alita’s rogue’s gallery all look much weirder than her, and this context rebalances the non-human aspects of her design.

That said, Alita:Battle Angel isn’t without its own problems. Foremost among these, the pacing is very strange. For the first two-thirds of the movie, things move along at a consistent pace, with a sense of an impending dramatic climax. By the middle of the third act, however, it becomes abundantly clear that the film is going somewhere else altogether. I hate to recommend sequels, but this movie would be better with a tighter script and a planned sequel. Ending the movie in the middle of the third act would give the movie a much more stable structure.

Moviegoers may or may not object to these technical problems, but they will be relieved with the minimal content issues in this film. Despite its “C” grade for violence, Alita:Battle Angel is surprisingly not a gory film. The violence, while it sounds graphic, is almost entirely between cyborgs. This makes a difference because they can sustain the loss of basically every part of their body, and have it replaced by a mechanic. Indeed, one character has his entire head and spine removed and relocated into a new body. This resistance to serious damage really takes the edge off the violence, and injuries that would be horrifying and life-altering in human characters are usually just a minor inconvenience. Other than the violence, the movie contains five profanities, minor background drinking, and no sexual content.

Alita: Battle Angel isn’t anything genre-bending or groundbreaking, and it can be a little “paint-by-the-numbers” at times, but its still a fun movie for older kids and teens, and it offers all this with a surprisingly small list of content concerns. I’m not sure that makes it “angelic”, but it’s a lot better than the alternative.