Pat Cadigan’s Alita: Battle Angel — What a Film Becomes on the Page

Alita: Battle Angel adapts Yukito Kishiro’s manga Battle Angel Alita, originally titled Gunnm. James Cameron developed the film and stayed on as a producer while working on the Avatar sequels. Robert Rodriguez directed.

The film reached South Korea on 5 February 2019, ahead of its 14 February US release.

Its commercial reception was mixed, but the action and visual effects made the film worth seeing.

The World of Alita: Battle Angel

In the far future, the film puts two versions of society within sight of one another.

The floating city of Zalem hangs above a city on the ground. The distance between them is also a social divide.

The story opens in a scrapyard. A doctor finds the discarded remains of a cyborg that can still be saved. He takes her home and gives her a new body.

Humans and Cyborgs

The technology of Iron City makes humans and cyborgs neighbours in the same streets.

Some inhabitants live their whole lives in the bodies they were born with. Others lose parts of themselves in accidents and rely on mechanical replacements. The world also has beings built from the start. What stays with me is how ordinary such differences look to the people living alongside them.

The Girl in the Scrapyard

The doctor, Dyson Ido, lives in Iron City, where Zalem hangs in the distance. The cyborg he finds among the scrap is Alita.

She meets the city with an openness that makes her seem younger than her abilities would suggest. As she learns to live among its people, experiences bring back pieces of a past she no longer remembers. Finding out what she once was changes what she can choose to become.

Zalem and the Distance It Creates

Zalem makes the separation visible. Its inhabitants seem to live in an entirely different world from the people on the ground, even though one city can see the other.

The film stays close to Alita and the inhabitants of Iron City. Much of what they want is directed toward the city above them.

Two Sides to the Same Person

Ido is especially interesting in the way he brings two lives into the same character. There is something of Jekyll and Hyde in the gap between his public life and the side of him Alita discovers.

The tension comes from not being able to account for him with a single description. The story is full of people who become more complicated the longer you look at them.

Making Alita on Screen

The film uses visual effects to bring Alita to life. Her unusually large eyes keep something of the manga in her appearance and set her apart even in a city full of altered bodies.

The same digital work gives the action much of its pace and physical excitement.

That is especially clear in Motorball, the sport the film uses to put Alita’s abilities on show.

The Manga Behind the Film

Kishiro’s Gunnm ran from 1990 to 1995 and was collected in nine original volumes.

The basic world is recognisable in both versions, although some names differ. Kishiro’s manga includes the original series and related books:

• Battle Angel Alita
• Battle Angel Alita: Last Order
• Battle Angel Alita: Mars Chronicle
• Gunnm: Other Stories

The film draws primarily on the manga’s early volumes and brings Alita to the threshold of another Motorball match. The ending deliberately leaves room for more.

The source manga takes the story well beyond where the film stops. Public talk about a continuation has periodically revived interest in that ending.

The Official Movie Novelisation

Pat Cadigan’s Alita: Battle Angel — The Official Movie Novelization turns the screenplay into prose and keeps the film’s main story intact.

Its advantage is access to what characters think. A look on screen can suggest a feeling. A chapter can stay with that feeling long enough to follow the character’s reasoning.

The setting and the action also have to be built from sentences. The way Cadigan breaks a scene into physical details makes some sequences more legible than they are at screen speed.

Ido’s discovery of Alita is the passage I remember best. A brief sequence in the film takes up several pages in the novel. There is time to see where he is, follow the work of his hands and understand what he makes of the damaged body in front of him.

The Pleasure of Reading It After Watching

The events remain familiar if you have already seen the film.

The experience changes because prose has a different pace. It lets the reader spend time in the spaces between the things the camera shows.

I read the novel in English after watching the film. Knowing the story made it easier to stay with the prose. If you enjoyed the film and are looking for an English novel to read, that familiarity gives you a useful place to start.

Book Information

Alita: Battle Angel — The Official Movie Novelization

Author

Pat Cadigan

Publication

19 February 2019 (US edition)

ISBN13

9781785658389

View the book on YES24

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