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Alita: Battle Angel is back in the cheap theatres! Hurray! I once felt moved to defend it from unkind social justice warriors. (SJWs) Here is my old post, condensed:
Madeline wrote: “Moviegoers give this film 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, while critics give it 52%… Does anyone see the problem here?”
I was on Youtube, viewing one person’s defence of the live action Alita: Specifically, he was replying to various tweets by social justice warriors. The Youtube commenters? Everyone was on his side. It seemed like every second commenter was concluding: “From now on, every movie the social justice warriors disparage, is a movie I will rush to go see.”
The comments under the OST soundtrack are full of people who disagree with professional film reviewers. For example:
Phil Anderson wrote: “Saw it over the weekend with my daughter and we BOTH loved it. The action was amazing and watching Alita learn and grow and adapt to her instincts was wonderful to watch. And I think that EVERYONE in her world underestimated her.”
While the comic was great enough to be one of the first to be translated, back when Dark Horse comics pioneered bringing over Japanese works, the film is not intended to be Interstellar or Arrival. On its own terms? I liked it. I’d see it again.
Movie Appreciation
In a sense, it’s a coming of age show, about a feisty heroine determined to have agency, to learn and grow. In the first minute of the film, in a world where cyborgs are common, Alita is mysteriously discovered by Doctor Ido (Eedo) on a scrap heap, being only a head and part of a spine. When activated, she has no memory of her past. Feisty, she wants to find out. Her new body, originally intended for Doctor Ido’s young daughter, is symbolically young. Not romantic, but still pretty.
Remember youth? I do, maybe because I left home for the big city as a minor, giving me vivid memories. “Naive” means “unexposed”: You find out the hard way how long food lasts in the refrigerator; your uncle Polonius may advise you to “neither a lender nor a borrower be,” but chances are you learn that the hard way too; and you find out about friends. So often on TV a group of excited young people has someone at some point joyfully saying, “We’re like family!” In youth we all “want to believe,” later we lament “only the good die young.”
Fresh in town, we are wanting to know ‘who am I… am I normal?…’ Young Alita’s “love interest,” therefore, is not meant as a breathless kiss-kiss romance but as what freelance journalists call a composite character, standing in for a newly arrived youth’s friends, including best girlfriend and a platonic male friend too. So Alita’s keen selfless interest is better likened not to romantic passion but to a naive teen crush. Remember? Quite believable to me, even if critics frown.
I read a movie critic’s report that the whole theatre laughed when the boy looks past her mechanical arms and answers Alita fearful question: Yes, she is human, “the most human” to him. Well, that’s exactly how the youth I remember talked. Corny but earnest. Nobody in the theatre I attended laughed. Perhaps the critic who heard that laughter was at a media screening among older generation “establishment” people too jaded for their own good.
Later in the movie Alita does her cyborg thing and upgrades to a new body, one which she “subconsciously” envisions as older and prettier, in both colour and shape, but not precisely as plain as the average full-grown teenager’s body would be, according to the precise insurance actuarial tables. And here is where the social justice warriors get their knickers in a twist. I would say to them: Relax!
If Alita envisions herself as full-grown then maybe centuries ago, before she went to the scrap heap, she did indeed have a full-grown body. Hollywood fantasies are not like real life, right? “Alita is sexist!” say the SJW critics who mi-i-i-ght be feminist wannabes, but are probably male, and surely lack perspective. Well, I see Hollywood beauty as inevitable, as surely as Fabio replaces me on the cover of every Harlequin romance. You might as well say it’s sexist when the actor who played Luke Skywalker, one day in a toy store, picked up an action figure of himself, widened his eyes and said, “They’ve got me on steroids!”
They tell me the average social activist does NOT self-describe as a feminist. Such a pity.
On the Internet I read much talk about Alita’s big eyes being controversial. But if I lived in a fantasy future I would tell any girl who fearfully asked me about her eyes, “All the better to enjoy you, my dear.”
I like calling people “dear.” I should do so more often. Quite unlike social justice warriors, I would rather softly sing Kume by yah, or even, God forbid at my age, savour the howling of a loud heavy metal band, anything rather than squish my brain by indulging in hatred and rushing off and stumbling to worship at the altar of the latest nasty tweets.
Sean Crawford
Calgary
February 2019, August 2023
Afterthoughts:
~I wonder if web SJW’s are worse than real life SJWs? Maybe I am being too harshly against them. Because two days ago my pen-pal and fellow web-essayist, Derek Sivers, wrote about tweaking his latest post. Note: Derek gets hundreds of comments per post, so he has credibility when he writes to me about tweaks:
“…Last paragraph:
OLD: You can change history.
NEW: You can change your history.
Many emails were furious, “How dare you! Are you going to tell me that the Holocaust never happened!?” Ugh. Added one word “your” and those comments stopped.
So interesting how tiny tweaks can make such a difference.”
… …
Of course, I myself usually get zero comments per post. (Sigh!)
~Link to BBC article on Why so many young women don’t call themselves feminists
