As of time of writing, Alita: Battle Angel is the most technologically advanced film on the planet! The visual effects work is irreproachable! You could literally ignore the entire movie and just focus your eyes on the protagonist Alita. From the pores to the freckles, from the pigments to the flaccidity, look at all her minute CGI-grafted facial details! The wide range of expressions she gives transcended everything human beings are capable of!
Alita: Battle Angel is one of those motion pictures that utilized its luxurious budget appropriately, as you can see each and every inch of the tremendous spending result onscreen! Aside from the Herculean visual effects effort, the top-notch production design and groundbreaking practical effects will come to your notice as well! Humanoid cyborgs, vehicles, weapons, Hellhounds, Centurions, Berserker body, cloud-guarded walls, you name it! Bill Pope's cinematography flawlessly kept up with the pacing and Tom Holkenborg's score packed so much of energy needed for the storytelling!
The action sequences were absolutely miraculous with clear and crisp geography at all times despite being computer graphics heavy! Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron has provided fellow filmmakers a good opportunity to learn how, when and where to beautifully and gracefully use the time-freeze functionality in a stunt! Alita's first encounter with cyborgs and Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley), bar fight immediately followed by a heartbreaking second battle with Grindcutter-upgraded Grewishka, Alita versus Centurions plus all the Motorball tryouts were immaculately designed, choreographed, executed and canned!
James Cameron penned the screenplay along with Laeta Kalogridis, and one could easily see the esteemed director's identity all over the script, despite Alita: Battle Angel being a manga source material. Characters wise, the names were short and memorable, there's arc for every main one of them and their motivations were solid. Alita (Rosa Salazar) transformed from an unknown to a newborn legend over the course of 2 hours, and this was solely achieved by throwing myriad obstacles on her path - memory loss, prevention of past discovery and death of a loved one to name a few. Self-realization at the correct point between crisis and climax catalyzed her growth into a fully realized persona at the end of the show!
On the flipside of things, there were quite a number of exposition-spilling throughout, in which some were smoothly integrated into the proceedings, while some could have been polished a round or two. Plotting was a little uneven when it came to balancing between Alita being a Hunter-Warrior and Motorball champion. Hugo's (Keean Johnson) death happening twice was part of the reason why Act III stayed longer than needed. The first time it occurred was impactful enough and it helped the character achieve his necessary arc. With that being said, his second death was painful too as it supplied our protagonist hope of having a cyborg partner just like her before snatching it away permanently. Last but not least, it didn't make sense for Alita to handover her Berserker heart; the heart and body she adamantly wanted her brain to be connected to for her to be her real self, willingly and eagerly to Hugo.