Alita: Battle Angel

Alita: Battle Angel is a headache-inducing, style-over-substance, CGI-flooded 3D film collaboration between Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) and James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar), which seems somewhat interesting on paper, but when you actually sit down to experience it, well, it plays out like a two-hour long vapid blooper reel of nothingness, a video game demo that you cannot control. Then the depression, nausea, and regret really sets in – you want your time back that you cannot get back. You start to have this realization that James Cameron is truly the cinematic king of yawn and that he can’t, never could, and never will be able to write his way out of an eco-friendly reusable grocery sack.

You start to think back and accept the fact that Titanic was one of the highest grossing/awarding winning, yet dumbest/poorest written (and pointless) films of all time. You feel cheated. You feel like James Cameron’s bitch. Then you start thinking about how Avatar was even worse than Titanic and how people actually thought it was somehow “deep” and/or “amazing” (said with a smug arrogance, with their eyes closed). You manage not to vomit or commit ritual suicide. Then you realize (you blacked it out before) that Avatar was really just a blatant rip-off of the cartoon movie Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992) and then your mind goes on another tangent – “the only person that rips things off more than James Cameron is Stephen King.”

Then you think of something else James Cameron-related that pisses you off. Last time you went to Disney World you went to this wonderful park called Animal Kingdom and they had built a new section that had nothing to do with animals at all – The World of Pandora. You waited in line for over an hour and half to ride the Na’vi River Journey, which is the shittiest Disney ride ever made (overseen by Cameron himself). Basically it’s the Small World ride, but you see a giant-sized animatronic blue Smurf from Avatar at the end. Disney spent millions on it.

The only thing more overrated than Cameron has to be Christof Waltz. He shows up playing the same character in every movie he’s in, flexing zero range with his acting, but at least he’s dressed up in excessive CGI special FX here. YAWN. The source material was originally written by Yukito Kishiro. It was a Japanese comic book, then anime originally, so, of course no one cares about that kind of stuff except some dude living in his grandma’s basement. I just assumed some dork’s gender.

[PG-13]