[wpdevart_youtube]w7pYhpJaJW8[/wpdevart_youtube]ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL ***
Dir: Robert Rodriguez (12A, 125 mins)
Long in gestation, this manga adaptation was first earmarked by James Cameron as his return to sci-fi after the mass success of Titanic. Twenty years later, Sin City director Robert Rodriguez takes the helm in a familiar tale of a cyborg woman warrior discovering who she is. Rosa Salazar is the heavily CGI-augmented Alita, a huge-eyed weapon of mass destruction found in a junkyard by kindly Dr Ido (Christoph Waltz) and reassembled in a dystopian future world. He realises that she is a relic of an earlier time and can re-establish a sense of order in a world plagued with death and destruction. To do this, of course, she has to fight lots of people and cyborgs, most notably in a Rollerball-esque sequence, as baddies Mahershala Ali and Jennifer Connolly close in. There are elements of Ghost In The Shell and many other sci-fi films within this SFX blockbuster. Rodriguez has always been good on spectacle and eye candy, if not drama and humanity – this could capture both with James Cameron’s involvement. Opens Feb 6