Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

Hey, I am as surprised as you might be to be saying this, but maybe more people should check out Alita: Battle Angel. It's not necessarily going to become your new favourite movie, it's certainly not going to placate you if you've been spending some time recently seeking out quality cinema with great actors delivering ear-tickling dialogue, but it's a fantastic bit of escapist fun, set in a world full of cool little details and wonderful production design.

The film starts off with Christoph Waltz, playing a Dr. Dyson Ido (and his surgical work now involves a lot of engineering or robotic parts), finding a discarded cyborg body that he then rebuilds and reactivates. The cyborg is Alita (Rosa Salazar), a young woman who strives to remember her past, and who ends up having a number of much bigger cyborgs tasked with ending her life.

Based on a manga (Gunnm AKA Battle Angel Alita) by Yukito Kishiro, Alita: Battle Angel comes to the screen courtesy of a screenplay by James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis and direction from Robert Rodriguez. As ridiculous as it may seem, considering some of their achievements throughout their careers, none of these names are the draw they once were. People tend to actively mistrust Cameron nowadays, with good reason, considering how many times he has done his bit to sell us on Terminator sequels of ever-diminishing quality. Everyone is on good form here though, and it's refreshing to see Rodriguez back at the helm of something that is looking forward rather than trying to emulate the past (he does the latter well, but it's a well he's gone back to a few too many times throughout his career).

The cast help to sell everything, especially Salazar in a role that transforms her into the wide-eyed central character and Waltz as the fallible human who kicks things off. Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali are enjoyable as the people who are manipulating events to direct Alita towards dangerous confrontations, Keean Johnson is the pretty male/potential love interest, and a couple of the main mean cyborgs are played entertainingly enough by Ed Skrein and Jackie Earle Haley.

But don't go thinking I am praising this as a near-perfect cinematic experience. While it delivers on the eye candy, and it really does (I was relieved to see that Rodriguez could still do well with action scenes), it's also full of good quality cheese. The script is silly and clunky, especially in the few moments in which it tries to have characters showing some real emotions. It's easy to forgive, however, as we're taken from one gorgeous sequence to the next (whether it's just a crowded street scene or a violent sporting tournament).

I'm not sure if we'll ever get any other instalments after this one, it didn't seem to do as well as expected at the box office, but I do know that I'll try to catch them on the big screen if we do. For sci-fi action blockbusters that enjoy pretending they have some depth to them, this is one of the better examples we've had in recent years.

7/10

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Mubi Monday: If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

It's a difficult job to follow up a film as impressive and moving as Moonlight but that is the job that writer-director Barry Jenkins has given himself. The fact that this isn't quite as good as that film doesn't mean it's a bad film. Not at all. It just means that it could have been better.

Kiki Layne is Tish Rivers, a loyal girlfriend to her partner, Alonzo 'Fonny' Hunt (played by Stephan James). That loyalty, and her strength, comes to the fore when Fonny is put in jail for a heinous crime that he didn't commit. With the help of her family, Tish does all she can to maintain a good lawyer and work on achieving the break that they need to get Fonny released, hopefully in time for the arrival of their baby.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this would prove slightly underwhelming, because only something close to perfect would rival the previous film from Jenkins, and there's a familiarity to the storyline here that stops it from feeling as unique and vital as Moonlight, but that familiarity is also part of the reason why Jenkins must have wanted to make it. Adapting the book by James Baldwin, Jenkins has another tale full of love and race, but it also has a sense of resignation to it, a sad inevitability as we follow the plight of yet another young black man wrongly imprisoned.

Set mainly in New York of the 1970s, Jenkins does an impressive job of evoking the atmosphere of that time without trotting out the expected selection of tunes and pop culture references, instead painting a much more detailed picture with the attitudes of the main characters and the muted colour palette used throughout.

Layne and James are both very easy to root for in the lead roles, with the former a constant source of quiet strength and dignity throughout and the latter trying to act likewise, despite viewing the world around them with more of a cynical and self-defensive attitude (the difference between the two highlighted as Fonny tells another character about a prospective landlord who was a lot more accommodating before he realised that Tish had a partner). Regina King is the standout, however, as Sharon Rivers, the mother of Tish and a woman determined to do whatever is necessary to keep her family happy, healthy, and safe. The film arguably revolves around one moving scene, featuring King and Emily Rios, and it's a moment that illustrates both great pain and great futility for both women. Ed Skrein is a loathsome police officer, and there are uniformly excellent turns from Colman Domingo, Teyonah Parris, Michael Beach, Aunjanue Ellis, Diego Luna, Finn Whitrock, and everyone else involved.

Despite the romantic notions of the main characters, love cannot solve all problems and overcome all obstacles. But it can make a bad situation more bearable, just knowing that someone who cares for you is always on your side, always has faith in you. Sometimes the doubt and judgement of everyone else in the entire world doesn't matter one bit as long as the contents of your heart and soul are an open book to the one you love, and the fact that Jenkins makes this a clear, positive, message in a story that also focuses on the bias of the American justice system and the way in which so many African Americans can be punished for crimes that police want to pin on any black individual . . . well, that's why it's not a bad film. In fact, it comes very close to being a great one. And I look forward to his next one.

8/10

You can buy the excellent Moonlight here.
Americans can buy it here.

Netflix And Chill: Tau (2018)

At the start of Tau we see Maika Monroe (playing the lead character, Julia) weaving her way through a crowd and getting up to some pickpocketing mischief. Then, just moments later, she is incapacitated, her character moved to the house that is the main setting for the movie. That's a great shame. As Tau starts to become more and more tedious, it becomes apparent that we may have been better off seeing the character of Julia in some other, any other, kind of story.

But here's what we get. Julia wakes up and finds herself imprisoned, alongside some other people (let's just call them "inconsequential and interchangeable corpses-to-be"), in a house that is protected and managed by a state of the art AI system, Tau. After an escape attempt that turns the corpses-to-be into corpses, Julia is made to undergo a number of tests by the home owner (Alex, played by Ed Skrein). If she does well then the information gathered from the test results will help Alex to move ahead in his work, but she will still have to die when no longer useful.

There are a couple of half-decent ideas buried in this film. Tau itself (voiced by Gary Oldman) is an impressive creation, with a nice line in curiosity about the nature of identity and humanity. The visual FX work is generally good and the visualisations as Julia is tested or communicates with Tau offer a respite from the one main setting. Unfortunately, there aren't too many other positives I can list.

Noga Landau doesn't have the most extensive writing career (everything before this is TV, and fans of The Magicians may already be familiar with her name) and it shows here, her failings exacerbated by the fact that this is the first feature directed by Federico D'Alessandro. Neither party really knows where to go with the central idea, instead wavering between a rumination on AI and a straightforward thriller about a young woman being held captive, and what lengths she might have to go to in order to gain her freedom. The end result is a mess, and it's not even an entertaining mess.

Monroe is a saving grace, putting in yet another decent performance. She can't do much to improve the material that she has to work with, but the film benefits from having her in almost every scene. Skrein is nowhere near as good, although that is as much to do with the script as it is to do with his flat, stilted, performance. Oldman does well enough in his voice role, I suppose, but I must admit that I spent the duration of the film thinking it was Jonathan Pryce lending his tones to the AI system. A compliment or criticism? I'm not sure.

Bear McCreary provides some good music to accompany the visuals, there are a couple of moments of bloodshed that are as unintentionally amusing as they are sudden, and the overall end result is, like many other Netflix options, a harmless enough time-waster that fails to make the most of its potential.

4/10

Buy a better sci-fi film about a "smart home" here.
It's also available here.