Well, I loved it. I'd watch it again. I'd put it on in the background while cleaning or something. It was what I consider a successful anime/manga adaptation, on a list of like...no other movies I can think of. They put together the first main stories of the manga and the anime adaptation into a reasonably coherent film where all the little parts linked together in a satisfying way. The manga is obviously not presented this way and a lot of these stories are meant to be taken individually, and Chiren as a character doesn't even exist. But having already consumed all of that material a bunch of times for over two decades, I can say very, very honestly that I was GLUED to the screen. The film is gorgeous and the care they spent on capturing the exact feelings of wonder and angst of the source material was superb. Anyone who felt like, 'Ugh it's just two hours of a robot girl falling in love and being a teenager,' this is what it was meant to be. As a manga fan, this movie was nearly perfect.
Nearly, as in this is an American movie in the era of YA and they transplanted her love interest from some other, stupider, movie. I went in knowing that they would use Hugo's story as the glue that binds the other stories together, which is half-true for the manga itself, but this standard pretty-boy who is also slightly a bad-boy thing was a little painful to watch. If not for how gorgeously rendered Alita is, how perfect her design ended up, and how real her performance was, I might not have been able to stomach that love story. That was a real disappointment because he is basically written exactly as presented in the manga, except there he's like a...like a scrappy rascal, I guess. White-bread Hugo of the film was bland and contrived, and I wish they had kept the element of the story where Hugo wants to go to Zalem because his older brother dreamed of going there. Also, his final scene is supposed to be dripping with madness. I waited the whole movie for that scene and I was hoping he'd be much more frantic trying to escape because that scene in the anime changed little 12 year old me like literally forever. I would have them go for a less obviously movie-handsome boy, someone skinnier with grungier look that kind of needs protecting; That's how he comes off in the manga, that he will go do what he needs to do despite being shrimpy and, although Alita is there to protect him he never operates on the thought of being rescued. Basically, Hugo as presented was not enough of a street-rat for me. Oh, also in the manga and anime, Yugo and his friends are stealing spines lol.
But as far as adaptations go, this was a real winner. They kept all the important beats, made literally all of the primary, secondary, and tertiary characters identifiable to their comic counterparts, captured the iconic frames perfectly on film, and modified the original content in a way that could bring disparate story lines together into something (relatively) cohesive. I've gotten pretty saturated on live action characters that are presented completely differently from how they originated, so it was nice to hear names like Zapan and Gashugan and so forth and be like, "OMG THEY LOOK PERFECT". There was real love for the source material here; I was nerding out the whole time. I was not hot on them including Motorball in this movie at first, because Motorball is its own separate arc that could have been made into it's own movie. She joins the circuit to deal with the heartbreak after losing Yugo in the original, but the way they incorporated it actually worked really well as far as how movies need to be structured; and the Motorball scene was fucking cool.
I also wasn't a fan of how they shoved Dr. Nova into an already hugely bloated film (they even managed to shove in flashbacks to her time as a Martian, information that doesn't happen in the manga until WAY later). Dr. Nova is not crucial to the story, and peppering him in to prep him for a sequel was a mistake. I know they wanted to show some gravitas at the end by giving Alita conviction and determination to take down Dr. Nova for his part in killing Hugo, but I was already unsatisfied by how they handled Hugo in the first place. All that anger, in the manga, is focused on Zalem. I would have much rather the Dr. Nova screen time have been given to Hugo's backstory to make his ascent to Zalem more heartbreaking and save Dr. Nova to be the big bad in the next movie (which is how it happens in the manga basically). I'm kinda on the fence about seeing her flashbacks too, since they made sense for the movie and the information was accurate, but seemed like a lot of backstory and world building for what is, at its core, a teenage love story. I wouldn't have minded learning more about that stuff later on after we've fleshed out her character, but again, on the fence.
And my favorite thing is Alita herself. Rosa Salazar was the perfect person to play this role. This was full blown teen spirit, and directionally, I loved how she could switch back and forth from sweet and kind to cold and calculating. I was very surprised they managed to get her hot/cold personality to transfer to screen so well, because in the manga its like...cute one panel, death machine next...and they also do a lot of cute character deformations when she's not being a death machine. Salazar was 100% the perfect choice. One of the things people don't expect when they pick up Battle Angel is how much of a young person Alita is, filled with wonder and frustrations and love. This movie was like 20 years in the making for me, and I'm glad to say I wasn't disappointed. And her eyes were gorgeous.
7/10 as a film
9.5/10 as an adaptation
10/10 for teenage me that wondered if he, too, could ever fall in love again.
EDIT: Oh! I forgot to mention, there is this annoying part in the movie where Hugo called Alita 'Ally' and I almost squealed, because Alita's name in the original manga is Gally. The scene was only annoying because I was really annoyed with Hugo's face at that point, lol.
