Movie Review: Is Alita: Battle Angel a messenger of trans-humanism?

There simply is no way one can watch the movie, Alita: Battle Angel, and not talk about the future: be it the future of war, the future of love, the future of man or the future of the earth itself. Perhaps, this is the one movie visionaries have been waiting for. But sincerely speaking, all, or most, sci-fi movies are about the future. It is a cliché theme in visionary filmmaking.

For instance, when Bumblebee, a robotic blockbuster, premiered in the cinema last December, we saw how Christina Hodson, the screenplay writer, had the good sense to inject both emotive and knight-like humour to a machine. That was simply visionary.

We saw a combat built yellow autobot from the Cybertron planet display the emotional intelligence of a human being complete with the capacity to dance, cuddle, pity and love.

Beyond the movie’s structural frailties, the friendly Bumblebee endeared movie buffs primarily because of his capacity to see the tendencies of good and evil in man, knowing when to love and when to war and fighting for love as much as fighting for the survival of his rapidly extinctive autobot species. This was a refreshing Yes, Yes for the transformer spinoff and the entire science fiction world, earning it a 93 per cent rating by Rotten Tomatoes.

This revolution of humanizing machines has been gaining ground as far back as the origin of science fiction itself, but in Alita it becomes stark, clearly attacking the core of our consciousness, defiling the superiority of the flesh over iron. Alita bothers us. Our current self-esteem comes under siege before a mercurial, athletic, flexible and magnificent Alita so much so that a completely stupefied human person like Hugo (Keean Johnson) tells Alita (Rosa Salazar), an abandoned cyborg, that “You are the most human person I have ever met”.

On what basis would that assertion add up if not for sheer timidity on the part of Hugo, a street smart lad, who though conversant with the cyborg presence in his Iron City society, hadn’t encountered anyone quite as anime as the eponymous heroine.

Though many critics agree on the coming together of some “borrowed furniture” (as Kenneth Lowe calls it) from other sci-fi works in the visionary filmmakers James Cameron (Avatar) and Robert Rodriguez (Sin City) manga adaptation, the exceptionality of this movie lies chiefly in its aggressive poking of the global movement of trans-humanism.

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It is no doubt that the future in Alita is trans-humanism, a new movement that believes in the eventual and literal merging between man and machine. Interestingly, the prospect of this reality is not far-fetched. Brain implant is already showing such miracles as the ability to restore limited movement to the paralyzed and giving of sight to the blind. Technologies like Ellan Musk’s Brain Computer Interface, if perfected, will give the human brain superhuman processing capability.

And in the field of prosthetics, a kind of technological explosion has been predicted that will make possible the replacement of the entire body with an entirely artificial parts before 2029. Thus, trans-humanism is the concept of the immediate future. And Alita the movie argues that trans-humanism is the end game of technological advancement, the emergence of the human machine, or the half human half machine species.

In fact, Massachusetts Company known as Naralogics is currently perfecting the design of an artificial human brain. In the next few years the technology will exist that will digitally decode a human being’s consciousness and upload it in an artificial unit no larger than the actual brains.

If this happens it means that the human race will have achieved immortality. We will be able to conquer death completely. Our minds will exist in the digital realms, housed in an artificial body that can simply be replaced if injured or destroyed, along with a self upload of a backup copy of our consciousness in a brain-like shell.

The movie itself opens in a scrapyard, where metal wastes pour from above on one of the hilltops of the Iron City. Alita, an abandoned cyborg, is found in the scrapyard by Ido (Christoph Waltz), a compassionate cyber-doctor who realizes that somewhere in this abandoned cyborg shell is the heart and soul of a young woman with an extraordinary past. He takes the unconscious cyborg to his clinic for re-working.

When Alita awakes up, she wakes with no memory of who she is or what she does or any knowledge about the world around her. But with the help offered by Hugo, her new friend, Alita gradually learns to navigate her new life and the treacherous streets of Iron City. Though Ido tries to shield her from her mysterious history, her street-smart new friend Hugo continuously offers memory-triggering adventures.

But it is only the deadly and corrupt forces that run the city that eventually gives Alita the clue to her past, a cyborg with unique fighting abilities that those in power will stop at nothing to control. If she can stay out of their grasp, she could be the key to saving her friends, her family and the world she›s grown to love.

But like bees to nectar, Alita attracts trouble. Her catch phrase, “I do not stand by in the presence of evil,” shapes the plot tremendously as it encourages more fights between her and the forces. Alita loses her cyborg body. Dr Ido fits her with a new one. Hugo loses his human body. Dr Ido gives him a cyborg body. Alita and Hugo are trans-humanised. Thus, Cameron and Rodriguez wave the story of hope, adventure and the triumph of good successfully by justifying trans-humanism: this why Hugo had to die, while Alita lives on.