Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

There’s something about the future these days where it usually involves humanity’s downfall.  It’s odd how many movies have the planet’s population technologically worse off and a lot smaller than it is today.  In Alita: Battle Angel, there seems to be one city left.  There aren’t many people living there and the ones on the ground (Iron City) seem to live in relative squalor.  However, there is a great city in the sky (Zalem) where the people have it good.

It’s the 26th century.  The residents of Iron City produce goods for those in Zalem.  Many live in hope that they my get to move up, but that sort of thing doesn’t usually happen.   In fact, the only way to get up there is to be the best a roller derby-like competition.

Enter Alita, or what’s left of her.  Dr. Dyson Ido finds her head in a scrap heap.  By head, I mean a cybernetic skull and face with a human brain.  Amazingly, the brain has suffered no damage, despite having been there for who knows how long.  Dr. Ito is able to attach the head to a robotic body and revive her.  Unfortunately, she has no memory of her past life.

The movie comes across as the first part of a larger story.  The movie is based on the first few of a series of books.  Even if I didn’t know that, there would seem to be too many loose ends and not enough of a resolution.  Alita wants answers about her past.  We also never get to see much of Zalem.  (Everything is a wide shot and is usually from below.)

Comparisons to other movies aren’t undeserved.  Whenever I saw Zalem, I thought of Elysium.  The big difference is that we don’t actually see how the people live above.  The entire movie takes place on the ground.  The movie sets up a sequel and I have read that more movies are planned, so we probably will get to see Zalem at some point.  Still, having a population that’s divided based on class is nothing new.

The entire movie seems to be a vehicle for the 3D format.  I’m not saying it wasn’t entertaining, but it seemed to rely more on the visuals than the narrative.  In fact, I probably would have been disappointed if the movie wasn’t setting up Part II.  There are too many unanswered questions, like where Alita came from or how she managed to survive 300 years without a body.  This would seem to be the first act of a larger plot rather than a self-contained story.

I do think it’s a good start and is worth seeing in the theater.  I just wouldn’t go in expecting it to be like other movies.  In this regard, I think it’s a little unfair to compare it to other movies.  It does seem to be setting up a larger experience.

IMDb page

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

 

I’ve always been good at determining if I’d like a movie by the coming attractions.  I know that you can’t really judge a book by its cover, but I’m right 99.99% of the time.  While I liked Inglourious Basterds, I have to say that it wasn’t quite what I expected.

The movie starts with Colonel Hans Landa visiting a family on a dairy farm.  It’s the start of the German occupation of France and Colonel Landa is a Nazi officer looking for the one remaining Jewish family in the area.  He considers himself pretty good at what he does, as do many of the people that he’s come across.  It’s earned him the nickname The Jew Hunter.  He does find the family that he’s looking for, but allows one of them to escape.

Around the same time, American Lieutenant Aldo Raine is talking to his men.  He’s leading a group of men into France to hunt Nazis.  The group is made up of Jews, but come from all over the world.  One has even killed 13 Nazi officers before joining the group, known as the Inglourious Basterds.  The war hasn’t officially started for America, but the Basterds are going over a little early to get things rolling.

Fast forward a few years.  The woman that escaped Col. Landa is now running a theater under an assumed name, Emmanuelle Mimieux.  She’s approached by a Nazi officer, Pvt. Fredrick Zoller, who takes a liking to her.  Understandably, Ms. Mimieux doesn’t like him.  Pvt. Zoller can’t take ‘get lost’ for an answer, so he pursues her and eventually makes her an offer.  It turns out he’s a war hero that stared in a movie about the event that made him so well known.  He wants to use her theater for the premier.

She doesn’t like this at first, but talks it over with her projectionist.  Being that the projectionist is black, he doesn’t like Nazis, either.  The two decide that having so many Nazis in one place might be a good thing.  They hatch a plot to lock the group in and kill them all.

When the Basterds catch wind of the fact that the top four ranking Nazis (including Hitler) will be in attendance, they hatch a plan of their own.  With the help of a German actress/double agent named Bridget von Hammersmark, they can get in and plant explosives to take down the Nazis.

From the coming attractions, I got the impression that the movie was all about the Basterds.  The truth is that you don’t see much of them in the first half of the movie.  It isn’t until the second half that you really get to see more of them.  The movie is split between The Basterds and Mimieux.  I’m not saying that this is bad.  I can understand wanting to show Brad Pitt in the coming attractions.  It’s just that I could see a lot of people wondering if they got the right movie.

I have to warn you that the movie is more fiction than historical.  While some of the events are true, many of the events are not.  From what I can tell, there was no Bridget von Hammersmark, although she may have been based on an actual person.  (I couldn’t find anything beyond a character page in IMDb, but I’m sure I’ll get someone telling me that I’m wrong on this.)

Also, a good deal of the dialogue is subtitled.  As you might expect, much of the movie is in either French or German.  There’s even a little Italian mixed in.  Some of it is in English, but you can still expect to do a lot of reading.  The subtitles were a little small on my screen, but I do have a small screen.  I think whoever did the subtitles was expecting people to have a bigger TV set.

I’m going to have to put this in the 18+ category for the suitability for children.  This is a very violent movie.  When Landa kills the Jewish family, he does so without any sort of feeling or remorse.  He just kills them.  The Basterds do kill a lot of Nazis.  (Raine tells his men that they each owe him 100 kills and they’re expected to scalp those that they kill.)  Those that they don’t kill are given a scar and sent back to their Nazi commanders to tell them who the Basterds are.

On that topic, I did find one plot inconsistency.  Why put all of your top-ranking officials in one place?  As Landa points out, killing the top four will effectively end the war.  Doesn’t this seem too easy?  Even when the president addresses congress, at least one senator, representative or cabinet member is kept in a safe location just in case.  You’d think that at the very least, they’d have tons of security.

At 153 minutes, it’s a pretty long movie.  A little past the halfway mark, I found myself thinking, “crap… I’ve still got an hour to go?”  At least it picked up in the second half.  It took a while to set up the two main plots.   It really wasn’t that bad.  It‘s just that I thought that the movie had progressed more quickly than it really had.  I do think that the movie could have been trimmed by a few minutes in a few places, but nothing really dragged out to the point where I was waiting for that scene to be over.

Overall, I would recommend it.  I just wouldn’t recommend bringing the kids.  There will be a few uncomfortable moments. 

IMDb page

Django Unchained

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

Quentin Tarantino movies can be a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.  If you’ve seen the Kill Bill movies, you know they can be violent and excessive, which is great if you’re into that sort of thing.  Last week, my brother and I decided to see a movie.  Django Unchained was playing early enough that we could get a discount, so we managed to get up there for the 10:35 showing.  (We were also under the impression that we’d get out around lunchtime, but I’ll save that for later.)  I wasn’t sure what to expect of Django Unchained.  I had seen the cover of Vibe.  I had heard Tarantino speaking about the film on NPR.  I knew that this was going to be one of his more excessive films.

The movie is about a slave named Django.  A dentist turned bounty hunter named Dr. King Shultz is interested in purchasing Django; Shultz needs Django to identify three wanted criminals.  If Django is willing to help, he’ll get $75 and his freedom, so off they go to find the three bounties.  Along the way, Django tells Shultz of his wife, Broomhilda.  She was sold to another plantation as punishment for the two of them trying to run away.

When Shultz realizes how good Django is with a gun, he makes a new proposition.  Django is granted his freedom and money as promised, but if he wants to make more money, the two can team up to find more bounties.  The warrants stipulate dead or alive, but Shultz has a preference for dead.  Django likes the idea of killing racist white people, so he agrees.  They spend the winter capturing bad guys and saving up money.

Turns out that Broomhilda has been sold to a plantation owner named Calvin Candie.  Candie is charming, but is not a nice person.  As such, he would probably not be inclined to sell Broomhilda because they asked nicely.  So, the two of them devise a plan to pose as potential buyers of Mandingo fighters.  As it happens, Shultz is German and Broomhilda was raised by Germans, hence the name.  Shultz will offer to buy Broomhilda so that he might have someone to talk with in German as a side offer.

At this point, it’s hard to continue with recounting the plot without giving everything away.  The movie does go on for a while, but I don’t want to ruin some of the most gory action scenes in the movie.  To say that this is not a movie for children is an understatement.  Being that Shultz and Django are bounty hunters that tend to prefer dead over alive, we get to see a lot of killing and Tarantino is not shy about showing us blood.

Add to this the issue of slavery and all of the associated derogatory terms.  Django isn’t comfortable posing as a potential buyer of slaves, although he knows that he has to do this in order to save the woman he loves.  We also get to see people fighting to the death.  There’s even one scene where a slave is fed to the dogs.  I don’t think many children could handle the themes or the imagery.  Even as an adult, there were scenes that were uncomfortable.

Also, I get the impression that Tarantino was going for style rather that historical detail.  Sunglasses didn’t appear in the United States for something like sixty years after the events of the movie.  In one scene, someone is shot and not only sent flying, but sent flying it what would seem like the wrong direction.  (You can go to IMDb and look at the goofs section for more, if you want.)

This is one of those movies where everything fits in that everything is so out of place.  Leonardo DiCaprio is not know for playing villains.  German dentists turned bounty hunters weren’t known for helping out slaves.  Slaves weren’t known for speaking German, for that matter.  My brother and I both wondered why Shultz was so nice to Django.  He could very easily have left Django after finding the brothers.  It seemed strange that everything came together so well, but it all made for one coherent, if long, movie.

That’s the other thing.  The movie is just under three hours.  Even after the plot that I recounted here, there’s still another hour of movie.  I was joking with my brother that we should have gone to CVS, mostly because we were running late.  We decided against since it was so late.  With the coming attractions and everything, we didn’t get out until around 1:40.  The movie didn’t really drag at all.  It’s just that we didn’t realize that it was going to be so late.  If I had known, I would have gotten something before going into the movie.

This is a movie that I probably would want to see with my grandmother, but I could definitely see going to see with friends.  It’s one of those movies that you’ll probably know going into it whether or not you’ll enjoy it.  You can know roughly what to expect without ruining the surprise. 

Official Site

Official Trailer