Not your Dress-up Doll

Battle Angel Alita, Vol. 1-5, by Yukito Kishiro.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

I missed Alita: Battle Angel at the theater earlier this year, and am only just now getting caught up, thanks to streaming video. I found it very entertaining, with kickass fight scenes and real heart.

But as I always say, this is Nerds who Read. So, although comparisons with the movie are inevitable, my review today focuses on the original nine-part 1990-95 Battle Angel Alita manga, or to be precise, the five-volume 2017 “Deluxe Edition” re-release (each volume except the last contains two parts).

Some of the story will be familiar to viewers of the movie: How the cyber-doctor Daisuke Ido finds the head and shoulders of a cybernetic warrior discarded in the post-Apocalyptic “Scrapyard.” How he rebuilds her and names her Alita. How she joins him as a hunter-warrior, bounty hunters in a long, twilight struggle against rogue cyborgs. And how Alita fell into a star-crossed romance with the street urchin/handyman/spine snatcher Yugo, whose only goal in life is to leave the Scrapyard and move on up to the mysterious “floating utopia” of Zalem.

Mercifully, the manga does not include the tiresome Jack Skellington part of the story, the sequence in the movie in which the newly-rebuilt but amnesiac Alita darts about the Scrapyard, gleefully exclaiming “What’s that?” at each new sight. On this point, the manga is definitely superior to the movie: we get to the action that much faster (Yeah, I know. Jack actually said, "What's this?" But I think my point is clear).

In spite of this and some other added material, the makers of the Alita: Battle Angel movie (as well as the makers of the 1993 OVA) deserve praise for staying true to the source material, right down to duplicating some of the manga’s most iconic images.

But the movie covers little more than Volume 1 of the manga. After that, Alita goes on to have many new adventures, love interests, and battles. Volume 2 fleshes out her Motorball career. Volumes 3-5 revolve around the relationship between the surface dwellers and Zalem. The floating city imposes a cruel tyranny over the inhabitants below. Zalem appropriates nearly all the resources and manufactured goods of the planet’s surface, only enforces the laws to the extent that they bolster its own interests, and uses the Scrapyard as a dumping ground, with imagery that anticipates the Devil’s Anus in Thor:Ragnarok by two decades.

The people of the surface revolt in what becomes known as the “Barjack Rebellion”, led by the sometime Samurai, sometime centaur, always dangerous Den. Den is interesting in the way that Killmonger from Black Panther is interesting. He’s definitely the villain, and yet one can’t help thinking, “He has a point.” In any case, he turns out to be not what he seems.

We also see a lot more of Desty Nova in these later volumes, who we glimpsed in the movie, the Ed Norton character pulling strings behind the scenes.

My one complaint about the manga is I often found the fight scenes hard to follow. Seriously, what’s going on here?

But aside from that, I think this is a wonderful series. Part of its strength comes from the relationships between Alita and the people around her, in particular Yugo and Dr. Ido. In this respect she reminds me of another diminutive 1990s action heroine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Alita’s crush on Yugo is far more layered than in the movie, a beautifully true-to-life portrayal of a teenager in love. She falls hard for this cute boy with a cool bandana and an adorable smirk who knows where he’s going. She waits outside his house all night for him to come home. She does his laundry and makes plans for their future together, at least when she’s not staring out over the city and moping about whether they have a future together. Alas, although he does like her, he’s not as into her as she is into him; he has his own thing going on. Thanks to these nuances, his choices later in the story make a lot more sense than they do on the Big Screen.

But it is Alita’s relationship with Dr. Ido that is the most touching, one of father and daughter. It’s not perfect. Sometimes he’s a great sounding board, for example listening sympathetically, albeit with a touch of amusement, to her romantic problems. Other times she has to lay down the law with him, as when he tries to forbid her from becoming a hunter-warrior.

Indeed the whole plotline about the Barjack rebels is just a side-mission for Alita: she crosses their path while on a multiyear quest across ruined landscapes to find Ido, who has gone missing. Through it all, they both make mistakes, some of which have serious consequences. But they do it because they care about each other.

Comparisons between Alita and Captain Marvel are ubiquitous on the web, and for good reason: both of their movies came out around the same time, both are women with incredible powers who do not remember their origins, and are therefore on quests to find out who they are. Both their mentors try to hold them back, ultimately without success. But IMHO, it’s these relationships with their mentors that set the two superheroines apart. Ido is motivated by love for Alita and holds her back, and even opposes her sometimes, in a misguided effort to keep her out of danger. Captain Marvel, in contrast, is a feminist parable in which her mentor, Yon-Rogg is the very embodiment of The Patriarchy; he holds her back because he wants to control her. Indeed all the males in her life are awful—with the exception of those who are comic relief.

I think this gap between the emotional resonance of Alita and the coldness of Captain Marvel is why audiences split on the two movies the way they did. As of the time I write this, Alita has a 93% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, compared with only 53% for Captain Marvel. Interestingly, the critics, more politically correct, split the other way, 61% for Alita and 78% for Captain Marvel (For a more in-depth analysis of Alita, Captain Marvel, and feminism, see Ian Kummer’s post, “Alita, the Battle Angel, fights her feminist critics” on the Fabius Maximus website).

The other marvelous thing about the Battle Angel is that she’s just so badass. Absolutely unstoppable. In one fight, her opponent literally tears her limb from limb, until there is nothing left of her but her head, shoulders, and one arm. And yet, she wasn't finished. Which brings me to another comparison with Buffy, specifically the Slayer’s fight against Angel in the season 2 finale. Angel has her on the ropes and taunts her, “That's everything, huh? No weapons...no friends...no hope...Take all that away and what's left?”

“Me,” Buffy replies.

Alita shares Buffy's spirit, but is a little more primal about it. When it was her turn to be stripped of everything, she merely screamed out a battle cry and, pushing off with her one arm, jumped back into the fight.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo Credit(s): Battle Angel Alita Kindle Edition, Fabius Maximus website, IMDB

Do I Look Like I’m Joking?

Joker.
Movie Review by Derek Power.

Where to begin? No, seriously, where to begin? I’m not kidding here. Why are you chuckling? Do you think this is funny? Am I some kind of clown? Do I amuse you?

Huh? Huh!

I’M ASKING A QUESTION HERE! WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING?!?!

…

…

...

Had you there for a second.

But to be so serious, the trailer for Joker, which opens in theaters this weekend, gives us a portrait of a man who’s not quite right to begin with, sometimes rejected and even beaten by the people around him, and eventually donning the clown face and purple suit that we’ve all come to know and love (or not) from decades of Batman movies, comics, and TV shows. All set against the background of a gritty 1970s-looking Gotham which clashes with the cheerful Jimmy Durante Smile though your Heart is Breaking soundtrack like the dissonance of a disordered mind.

Where can you begin in evaluating a film that looks at a character like the Joker?

For a character that’s octogenarian, the Joker still manages to provide new angles and approaches and has become for screen actors what Richard III still provides for stage ones (screen too). For a character from perhaps the most widely-known modern myth, he has become the closest that man has created to something on the level of Lucifer and makes all the other classic mythic antagonists—Ulysses’ Poseidon, Beowulf’s Grendel—seem like, well, clowns. But as an idea, the Joker has also come to embody not just moral evil, but also the non-rational. Thus, a better question to ask is: how can you make rational what is already irrational?

Perhaps the best approach is to start by saying what the movie is not. After all, by eliminating statements you know to be false, you get ever closer to understanding what it is.

It is not a comic book film.

Let’s start simple. Yes, this is all based on characters from DC. But apart from that and the clear influence of the 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke (more on this later), Joker owes extremely little to any established lore found in any Batman comic. Thus, it is nothing like what we now consider comic book films based on the current crop like that eleven-year effort which concluded with this year’s Avengers: Endgame. But it’s not just a matter of a clear storyline with a clear protagonist and a clear antagonist. If anything, the usual antagonist is this film’s protagonist in that everything in the film is shown through Arthur Fleck’s (Joaquin Phoenix) eyes.

It is not an origin story of the Joker

Despite its title, this is not a definitive telling of how the Joker became the Joker. For starters, it owes nothing to established comic lore. There is no nod whatsoever to “The Man behind the Red Hood” (originally Detective Comics 168, February 1951), which is the earliest story for the Joker and gave us the “dropped into a vat of chemicals” origin. Even the story that many have used as a Joker origin story—the aforementioned The Killing Joke (written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland)—is not really an origin story and hearkened back to the earlier Red Hood story. In fact, during The Killing Joke, the Joker tells Batman that his own memory of events keeps changing over time, which could be viewed as one of those escape clauses so liberality could trump continuity.

It is not some soft franchise reboot

Without getting too much into the spoilers, there are moments that suggest this is some attempt to restart a DC cinematic universe to compete with the now fairly complete Marvel one. But personally, I don’t see it happening and if it does, it won’t be through this film.

It is neither a rehash of the past, a single allegory of the present, nor a forecast to the future

By this point, you have no doubt heard the numerous comparisons of Joker to the works of Martin Scorsese and, in particular, Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1983). There is no denying it. Hell, Robert de Niro is even in it as Murray Franklin, who could very well be Rupert Pupkin finally getting his act, and his act together, and becoming a kind of Johnny Carson/Ed Sullivan type. But at the same time, Joker is not a carbon copy of those films. On the whole, it certainly owes plenty to those American films of the 1970s, plus or minus, starting as early as Midnight Cowboy (1969) and even going into the 1980s (for upcoming and seasoned viewers: note a marquee sign toward the end of Joker).

This film is also not some statement about the current state of the world. You can attribute Tolkien for me personally disliking or distrusting allegory, but the Oxford don has a very good point. Allegory is a one-way, single lane interpretation of a story and often marked by a specific time and place. Times and places fade into memory and then into dust. In the end, nothing beside remains. And so, it would be unfair to attribute allegory here.

And finally, the reason why it is not some future forecast is for me the same reason that Stanley Kubrick once gave film critic Alexander Walker about A Clockwork Orange (1971…and another point of comparison for Joker). Walker recounts, “It is not a forecast, it is a fable.” And to tie up all notions of time, any observer of the human condition—and especially over the last half-century or so—will not be surprised (after the shock dissipates) by anything shown here. The reason why Shakespeare is still relevant four centuries or so on is because human beings still do the same stupid nonsense. And like what has happened, a lack of care and forethought will mean the future can be its own “remake” of the past.

A-HA! I think I have something as to what it is. Basically, my Twitter assessment is thus:

It is a film that looks at an apathetic, even violent, world through an insane man who then becomes more insanely violent.

Good night, and good luck?

Joker (2019)
Dir: Todd Phillips
Scr: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver
Prod: Bradley Cooper, Todd Phillips, Emma Tillinger Koskoff
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen
Rated R for strong bloody violence, disturbing behaviour, language and brief sexual images

Derek Power is a musician/once aspiring filmmaker who lives in a society somewhere in eastern Massachusetts. He makes music under the name キラヨシ and can be found at kirayoshi.bandcamp.com. He can also be found being too clever for his own good on Facebook and Twitter.