Alita Battle Angel is a 2019 movie based on the Manga and Anime Battle Angel Alita that began life in the 1990s. The movie tells the story of Alita, a cyborg found in a trash heap under the last great floating city Zalem by Ido, a doctor living and working in Iron City. The movie is dense, covering about four plots from the original manga, all interwoven into one story. Alita seeks answers about herself, struggles with her relationship with Ido and his expectations of her, falls in love with Hugo, and strives to become a Motorball Champion.

First, I want to say – I loved this movie. It is hard for me to say what matched the manga because it has been a couple of decades since I read them. Alita has always been one of my favorites, so much so that when I first saw the theatrical trailer, I started screaming in the movie theatre.

I was excited.

I was also apprehensive. Anime and manga adaptations have not always gone so well into live action. Hell, comic adaptations period do not always work out so well. Rumors have floated for years about an Alita movie, but things never quite got off the ground. Worse, it is not a property that is as well known in the US as some other manga. It is not, say, Dragon Ball.

And we know how well that adaptation worked out.

Even with my apprehension, I was excited to see it. The movie exceeded my expectations. You can see that James Cameron truly loves the source material and while no, I do not remember all the minute details of the manga anymore, everything that I watched on the screen felt true to what I had fallen in love with in the 90s. The pacing was good. The CGI was amazing. The action was spectacular. More than any of that, though, I did not want to leave Iron City.

I wanted to stay in Alita’s world.

I still do. It is a rough world, but it is authentic and lived in. It is familiar to what I remember of the Manga, even if some details are adjusted, changed, added, or removed.

So yes, I loved this movie and I want to see more of it. I want to see this one again and I want to see a sequel.

But first, I want to dig a little into the movie itself and some of the things done. This is going to be the part where we get into some spoilers so … you have been warned.

Challenges of a Dense Story

When I said that the movie took four stories from the manga and wove them into one story, I was not exaggerating. The movie itself covers multiple manga graphic novels. I think I understand why Cameron did this with the adaptation. I think any one of the stories would have been too narrow of a story for a movie. I think it would have left too many questions about the world and Alita unanswered for the audience, and I do not think the pacing would have fit the theme when translated onto the screen.

Pacing for a manga (as with any book) is just not the same as for a movie.

A dense story, however, means that you must make some decisions. You only have so much space to develop characters, communicate plot, and instill your themes. You must rely on types and tropes, both of which can be dangerous. Relying on types and tropes  means, well, relying on tools that can leave you in problematic waters if not done well. You run the risk of reinforcing ideas that are … well, not good.

I want to look at tropes that Alita Battle Angel uses and how the themes that come with them are addressed and resolved. Spoiler – not all of them are resolved in a positive way. That said, the movie does some powerful things with the ideas it uses to create a story and I think it is important that we look at that critically.

First – The Problem – Ableism

So, remember that story-density issue I brought up? One of the problems with having little time to set things up is that you kind of need a reason why Ido is going to just happen to have a well-made full cyborg body lying around. A literal body-building montage is just not going to be good pacing to open your movie. So why not turn the dead cat into a dead child and make the body Alita gets an already made body for the dead child?

In 2019, humans have an interesting relationship with our technology. We are becoming cyborgs – no, my phone is not a literal part of my body but, I rarely get through a day without reliance on my smart phone for something beyond phone calls – but we are not comfortable with the merger we are seeing with our technology. If you have a person becoming a full-body cyborg, you need a reason for that to happen.

People in 2019 are not going to easily accept that someone just wants to give up their meat-body to become mostly machine. We need a reason that our body needs to be replaced. I mean, why am I going to give up all this fleshiness that I work so hard to maintain?

So why not go with the girl was wheel-chair bound?

And I think you get where I am going with this.

It is, I think, a problem inherent with cyborg stories. Your replacement is going to either be vanity (something that does not build audience empathy) or need. When you do not have time to build that need and the story around it, you must rely on short-hand, such as a wheel-chair bound daughter.

And that is going to be an ableist message. The story is going to create the impression that having an artificial body is better than a natural body in a wheelchair – and the movie does not address this at all. It simply draws on the trope to rationalize the opening McGuffin – Alita’s initial body gifted to her by Ido – and ignores the problems that trope carries with it.

This is, I think, one of the biggest flaws in Alita: Battle Angel. It sticks with me because it is not addressed and resolved where other problematic elements are. There are fixes for this – even fixes that would have fit within the density and pacing. But we’re not here for fixes. We’re just here to examine the tropes.

Now for the Good – Father/Daughter Dynamics and Maturity

When you have a Father Figure and a Daughter Figure, you will inevitably have a trope that comes into play. The dynamic almost begs for it: Father Knows Best. We can plot out the beats of almost every Father/Daughter dynamic movie using this trope the same way. Daddy has a rule. Daughter pushes against the rule. Daddy gets mad. Daughter rebels. Daughter gets in trouble. Daddy comes to the rescue. Daughter realizes she needs to follow Daddy’s rules. Daddy realizes he needs to be flexible. Some movies will play around with elements of the trope a little. For example, instead of Daddy coming to the rescue when trouble hits, it may be an acceptable Daddy surrogate, such as a trusted sibling or favored friend. Other times, Daughter may rescue herself by going back to Daddy’s rules.

Alita: Battle Angel uses this trope.

This is a good thing and I am going to have to explain myself well for saying that.

So, here is the thing about tropes. They exist for a reason. They exist because they are a familiar and easy shorthand. They exist because we find something reassuring and familiar in them. The Father Knows Best trope is no different but for Feminists like me, this trope is problematic.

Why does Daddy know best? Does he really know best? How is a daughter supposed to become an independent woman if her lessons have her depending on the men in her life?

These are questions the trope brings up. Using a trope is fine but problematic tropes should have the questions answered in some way. Most movies will focus on the first two questions (though not always giving a satisfactory answer) and leave the other just hanging or ignoring it as a question altogether.

Alita provides answers to all three questions, but not ones we are used to. We will look at the answers, but to get there, we must look at two other tropes the movie tackles.

The Replacement

The Replacement trope is a shorthand to create a bond between two characters. Protagonist A has lost someone and needs a reason to have Protagonist B around. Protagonist B becomes a replacement for the person Protagonist A lost. We see this trope a lot with adult/child pairings, where one or both has a loss (or lack) that the other fills. Most likely, you can name at least one property off the top of your head where this trope is used to cement protagonists together.

When this Trope is used, there is often friction that comes with it. The person doing the replacing has expectations based more on what is being replaced than the actual person who is present. Those expectations may be meeting emotional needs, or they may be performance expectations (“My son was a great athlete. Why don’t you like football?”).

In Alita: Battle Angel, we come to understand that Ido has expectations for Alita. He wants her to become his daughter and dependent on him. This plays out through the Hunter-Warrior storyline (one of the 4 plots I mentioned at the beginning). Until its resolution, however, it becomes part of the dramatic tension for all the plots. Ido wants to protect Alita where he could not protect his own daughter.

Born Sexy Yesterday

Born Sexy Yesterday is an interesting trope, but it can be annoying sometimes in how it’s used. You can get some fun stories from it, but it has a lot to unpack, but I am not interested in unpacking the trope. Instead, I want to look at how this trope intersects the Father Knows Best and Replacement tropes.

The most important thing to note: Alita is not born sexy. The body Ido gives her is young and underdeveloped. The cyborg body for Ido’s daughter is coded to be somewhere between 13 and 15 years of age, but I think closer to the 13 side of that range. This is important because there is something inherently creepy to the idea of Ido literally making a young woman he finds in a junk heap his replacement daughter.

The creepiness, however, is not a sexualized creepiness. Ido is not looking for a doll. He is looking for a daughter. However, whether we are making someone into a sexual object or an emotional object, when we force someone into a role, we are negating some amount of their agency.

That is creepy.

Why do I bring up the Born Sexy Yesterday trope, then, if there is not a sexualized creepiness to Ido’s actions? Well, because of what happens later. We will come back around to this trope, but let’s revisit Father Knows Best.

Father Knows Best

So, in the movie, Alita learns about the murder of women in Iron City. She notices that Ido disappears on the nights that women are murdered and on one occasion, he returns wounded. I do remember this plot being lifted straight from the Manga and what I remember of the resolution is similar enough to the movie. The correct beats are hit. Ido is not the killer. He is hunting the killer as a bounty hunter, known as a Hunter-Warrior.

Alita follows Ido, discovers the truth, and helps him in a fight, discovering in the process her affinity for violence and touching on a memory. She was a warrior once and fought in a battle on the moon. She wants to become a Hunter-Warrior and Ido forbids her. This is the push against Ido’s rules.

Later, Alita finds a cyborg body and brings it to Ido. It is beyond any technology currently in the world. Alita feels an affinity to the body but Ido refuses to switch her to it. It is a body made for war and he still insists on keeping her as his little girl.

Again, it is creepy, but not sexual. Agency is not always about sex. It is, however, always about choice.

Now, Alita rebels. She becomes a Hunter-Warrior, gets in over her head, and is severely wounded. Ido and Hugo come to her rescue and with the body of his daughter completely broken, Ido has no choice but to put her into the other cyborg body – the one Alita originally wanted.

This is the point in the story when, normally, the daughter comes to accept that she made a mistake and she apologizes. I was completely expecting this and surprised when it did not happen. Instead – Ido apologized to Alita for not giving her the cyborg body that he knew she was meant for from the start.

Let’s go back to those three questions.

Why does Daddy know best? Does he really know best? How is a daughter supposed to become an independent woman if her lessons have her depending on the men in her life?

Well … these questions no longer have the typical answers. Ido seems to know best because of his experiences and tragic backstory. Unfortunately for Alita, he really does not know best. He is just stubborn and unwilling to let go of his pain. The final question is the most problematic in this storyline and its resolution requires stepping back and looking at the implications of everything that has happened.

Alita rebels and gets in over her head but … who is actually at fault for that? Whose mistake led to her trouble? Ido’s apology and the lack of one from Alita suggests that the mistake that leads to her Damsel in Distress situation (another trope, ding) belongs not to her and her rebellion, but to Ido. Alita’s actions are the natural and logical result of Ido’s stubborn and selfish behavior.

The implication is clear.

Ido made a mistake and Alita was almost killed. He had to rescue her because he would not allow her to exercise her agency. The answer to our third question is laid out for us in the movie. The daughter cannot become independent if she must rely on the men in her life.

How does the movie respond?

Ido finally does the thing he should have. He gives Alita the body she asked him for in the first place.

Returning to Born Sexy Yesterday

So, one of the other creepy things that happens with Daddy/Daughter dynamics is that, well, Daddy refuses to accept that his daughter is growing up. Every movie where the Father frets over what boys will do to his daughter is all about refusing to accept that a girl will grow into a woman with sexual desires.

This is a very bad trope in the Daddy/Daughter dynamic but it is utilized here in a brilliant way: Alita is not a sexual diva.

When Alita gets her new body, it begins to reshape itself to fit Alita’s own mental image of herself. Ido’s assistant remarks that he had underestimated her age when her chest forms up a little more and her hips and waist become a little more defined. We also note a slight discomfort from Ido at this, as would be expected from a father who understands his daughter must grow up but is still unhappy about the prospect.

As an audience, we are trained to sexualize teenaged bodies. Again, you can think of at least one movie where this is the case. When we are presented with Alita’s new body, however, that is not the framing. We’re not sexualizing a young woman. We’re appreciating her maturity and realizing, as Ido does in the scene, that she’s not a little girl anymore.

While there is a romance plot in the movie, it and its physical implications are not the focus. It is the heart of the movie, yes. Alita’s relationships to Hugo and Ido both make up the heart of the movie. First and foremost, Alita is a warrior and that is how I am supposed to see her.

I found the intersection of the tropes and the resolution of them to be brilliant and refreshing. I cannot think of a time that I have seen the Father figure in the wrong where the daughter did not, at least superficially, share in the blame for anything bad that came from it.

I think that is a good place to end the analysis.

I loved this movie. I liked how the manga and anime were adapted into live action. I liked the addition of Chiren and can even forgive the resolution of her character (I feel like reversing the roles of Ido and Chiren would see few changes to the plot, so it feels less problematic, but that could just be my bias in favor of the movie). Yes, the movie has problematic elements. Yes, it is still imperfect in all its wonder and glory.

It was a fun movie and I am hopeful we will return to Iron City in the near future, hopefully with Cameron and Rodriguez still at the helm.

Originally posted on the Writer’s Manifest.