The story proceeds by fits and starts with a narrative line - Alita’s journey of self-awareness - that is embellished with a dreary old-fashioned romance and regularly interrupted by chaotic action scenes. Theirs is a post-apocalyptic meet-cute that morphs from yet another riff on Frankenstein’s monster into a sitcom-y father-and-daughter duet, plus brawling and exposition. The movie’s story, inspirations and allusions ( Hitchcock!), though, more rightly announce it as a 20th-century artifact, one that begins when Alita’s head and shoulders are found and refurbished by a paternalistic doctor, Ido (an atypically uneasy Christoph Waltz). It takes place in the 23rd century after a global cataclysm called the Fall. This brings to mind Jessica Rabbit, the bodacious femme fatale in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” who purrs “I’m just drawn that way” - yeah, but by whom, for whom and why?Ī pileup of clichés in service to technological whiz-bangery, “Alita” is one more story of the not quite human brought to life with hubris and bleeding-edge science. Kishiro sexes up his cyborg, an amnesiac who in the first comic retains one protuberant breast when the rest of her body is destroyed. Why does Alita (Rosa Salazar), who has a human brain, even have breasts? Why does any cyborg that isn’t a sex bot or a wet nurse? Genre convention only partly explains the onscreen look of this character, originally created by Yukito Kishiro in his manga series.

If only someone here were joking or had an idea about the construction of femininity. It also has larger breasts than the old model, a change that in a snort-out-loud line is pinned on Alita’s own ideas about how she should look. Her new physique turns out to be an innovative weapon and comes with articulated parts, a wasp waist and what looks like a discreet chastity panel for the groin. It’s a streamlined shoulder-to-foot job, one that makes her look like a sex doll with a chrome-plated musculoskeletal system. At one point in “Alita: Battle Angel” - another dystopian fantasy that reminds you of just how visionary the original “Blade Runner” was - the cyborg heroine gets a new body.

Index alita battle angel