Based on the acclaimed Ganmu manga series by Yukito Kishiro, the film adaptation Alita: Battle Angel is, unfortunately, a fairly straightforward film that never goes beyond the trappings that viewers have come to expect.

Iron City is a curious place. It is just like any other city, but its denizens have robotic limbs. If they build up a certain rep, these parts can be weaponized and a legitimate occupation is being a bounty hunter for the authorities.

For some in Iron City, which was built from the ruins of a war some 300 years ago, the spaceship-like city called Zalem that exists suspended above them is the ultimate paradise.

One fateful day, Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) finds the remains of a cyborg in one of Iron City’s many scrapyards. The brain of the cyborg, whose face is female and fitted with oversized eyes, is still intact. So he fixes her using the artificial parts he intended to give to his daughter, and she wakes up not remembering anything. Ido names the cyborg after his daughter, Alita (Rosa Salazar).

In the violent, teen movie Alita: Battle Angel, Robert Rodriguez follows up his Sin City duology by navigating through the familiar tale of a city beleaguered by oppression and the things that people do to attain some semblance of a normal life. This includes a popular sport called motorball and rules stipulating that the use of guns is punishable by death.

Ruthless: Vector (Mahershala Ali, center) is the main antagonist in Alita: Battle Angel.

Rodriguez, along with screenwriters James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, the former of whom also produced the film, tells the story through Alita’s perspective.

Alita is fun and visually engaging as seen in the great depictions of motorball (think an F1 race, but with the racers destroying each other).

It is a competent film, but given the fact that it took 15 years to bring to the big screen, Alita is lackluster. Part of this is the all-too familiar narrative.

As her memories come back, Alita realizes that she was a trained warrior from Zalem during the war. She uses her powers to fight the bad guys. The one bad guy that she needs to overcome is Mahershala Ali’s scheming Vector, who rigs the motorball matches and runs a stable of ruthless criminals with limbs and weaponry mostly cannibalized from others.

So Alita is mostly a story of self-discovery in one great junk pile of a futuristic cyberpunk city, which is detail enough to make your eyes glaze over.

Cyberpunk: Alita: Battle Angel takes place in a futuristic junk of a town.

Alita becomes self-aware under the watchful gaze of criminals — thankfully, she has her unbelievable fighting skills and a thirst for danger to keep her steady. She also falls madly in love with Hugo (Keean Johnson), with their romance taking up a lot of the 2-hour runtime.

What makes the movie interesting is the idea of leaving as a treasured thing that there’s only one way to do this: becoming the motorball champion. This is an avenue for the criminal enterprises. Vector navigates this world with such ease, with the help of Ido’s ex-partner Dr. Chiren (Jennifer Connelly, who is underused, much like Ali). Remember that Iron City also welcomes bounty hunting as a profitable job, and this includes Zapan (Ed Skrein), a metallic sword-slinger who only wants blood.

As a sci-fi flick, Alita: Battle Angel is rowdy enough to keep its thin narrative going. The actors, however, are decent. Salazar turns in a wonderful motion-capture performance as Alita, combining her gameness for violence and the innocence of a teenager whose memories have been wiped. Waltz is a benevolent father figure; Skrein is jeering and ruthless.

It is also obvious that this movie is setting the audience up for sequels — again, that’s not necessarily bad, just terribly familiar. Although it doesn’t hold its own as a standalone film, Alita is jist enough to raise interest in those sequels. Just tell Cameron to make the time. I mean, those Avatar movies are sure taking a while, huh?

Battle angel: Alita (Rosa Salazar), a cyborg with unbelievable fighting skills.

— Photos courtesy of 20th Century Fox

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Alita: Battle Angel

(122 minutes; 20th Century Fox, Lightstorm Entertainment, Troublemaker Studios)
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Cast: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly, Mahershala Ali, Keean Johnson