Aside from being a transhumanist sci-fi from 2019 — obviously helping to push a particular agenda relating to a particular problem-reaction-solution from around 2019 – Alita: Battle Angel is otherwise an entertaining movie with good action. A bit juvenile, but well scripted, well executed and consistently engaging.
I rate this movie Decent, which is quite complementary considering its juvenile aspect – the strong genre and execution kind of make up for that. It’s got a cool concept at times. Its inter-galactic souped-up transhumanist genre and its juvenile quality makes it a bit like a cross between Blue Beetle (DC movie with Xolo & Bruna), Dark Angel (series with Jessica Alba) and some kind of CGI-heavy semi-cartoony thing like Transformers perhaps. It it were a bit more grown up and human, without losing the slick action and excitement factor, it might resemble Dark Angel or Elektra or The One (with Jet Li) or even something more like The Matrix and it would be rated accordingly, but it’s not, so we’ll settle for a Decent rating.
A heavily CGI-d up version of Rosa Salazar plays the lead female and the main star of the movie, while Keean Johnson plays her boyfriend and one of the lead male roles. Christoph Waltz also plays one of the main male roles, as the doctor who originally finds Rosa’s character then fixes her and becomes her mentor in a very limited way. These main characters all give adequate performances but nothing that wows, while a few other supporting cast members do a pretty good job.
Elysium starts off with an interesting dystopian sci-fi concept but rather gritty screenplay. In the first half hour, not much happens to the least cast member except he receives a fatal dose of radiation poisoning in his workplace and is given five days left to live. This urges him to rekindle his old master criminal ways in order to reach the satellite city called Elysium – a place for the privileged to live away from the rest of humanity on Earth. He attempts to get there in order to heal himself, but it’s a dangerous mission – families have tried before and they tend to get shot down indiscriminately.
There’s a nice bit of action before the end of the first hour.
Much of the second hour constitutes a bit of an anxiety & depression fest – probably good for horror-drama junkies, but not so much for smooth action hero movie connoisseurs. Easily skippable if you’ve seen it before. Fortunately, that toxic junk at least intermittently subsides to make way for some half-decent action. This movie had a lot of potential to be a lot better than it eventually was though. Unfortunately, due to the amount of bad mixed with the good, I really struggle to rate it Above Average but I will on account of its genre & stars, and its resultant memorability.
Matt Damon manages to shave off his Jason Bourne identity (see what I did there?) by going bald in this movie – it’s not pleasing on the eye but at least it succeeds in creating a fresh new persona for this movie – this one having much more of an air of vulnerability from the start, since he gets radiation poisoning early on – quite fitting for a regularly toxic movie experience.
The fight scene at the end is dry and over dragged out – easily skippable, even though it’s kind of fast action – reminiscent of a Tony Jaa movie – no flying elbows, but just as spiritually dead.
Promoting radiation chamber type beds as cancer cures, at the end, was the icing on the cake – quite inkeeping with the Big Harma theme since the start.
On the plus side, the main baddies are played quite well by Jodie Foster (brains) and Sharlto Copley (brawn). Many of the cast members are pretty good, even if the movie is a bit thin and nasty while posing like it’s strongly representing a really cool genre.
This movie gets off to a messy start, but builds up an intriguing plot with some interesting characters by the end of the first half hour. Unfortunately though, the creativity soon dries up, the momentum dies down, and the quality dwindles. There are some interesting bits throughout, but it’s too few & far between for this movie to rank alongside the best Transformers movies (like the first and the fifth) – instead it ranks barely better than the worst (the 3rd and the 6th). I’d probably say it’s the third worst in the series, which makes it the fifth best, and I’m going to give it a Bang Average rating by the skin of its teeth – helped by the very ending which was not bad.
The new lead cast member – Anthony Ramos playing Noah Diaz – has great potential, but his demeanour in this movie is all too frequently gaumless when he’s not being too hot-headed. And his co-star girlfriend, Dominique Fishback playing Elena Wallace, is no better – the look on her face when trying to save the world is like that of a lazy low-IQ teenager who’s just been asked to do some household chores by her mother. Through these lead cast members, the script of this movie pushes some very shallow-minded approaches to dealing with emotional problems. Contrary to what this movie is teaching our kids, chanting sports terminology like ‘home team’ is not a meaningful message to deliver or a good way to spend the last few seconds of one’s life, and reciting your legal name and postal address is not serious solution for an identity crisis and lack of self-belief. Hasbro just can’t help themselves when it comes to setting terrible examples of leadership and emotional problem solving via their Transformers movies, and instilling disfunctional mindsets in our youth.
One of the coolest things in this movie is how the Autobot Transformer called Mirage, being nearly dead, gave all his kit to Noah who wore it like an Iron Man suit, which combined with his soldiering skills turned him into a top player on the battlefield. Albeit clearly part of a broader military recruitment push – a card which was played very hard at the end of the movie after the final battle was done; it was still a cool scene when it happened.
This begins with a bit of a prequel backstory, and gets off to a decent start thanks mostly to John Cena (as Agent Burns) who in the backstory set in the 80s was a special forces soldier on a training exercise when he sees Bumblebee landing on Earth, shortly followed by a couple of Decepticons.
But it goes a bit downhill when John Cena takes a back seat after the opening scenes, and the new lead cast member emerges as Hailee Steinfeld (playing Charlie Watson). Steinfeld was also a major supporting cast member in The Marvels (2023) which was a terribly ill-conceived and uncoordinated tomboy-power flop so that doesn’t stack up well for this movie.
When it gets going, this movie turns out to be like a cross between Transformers and Herbie, as Bumblebee takes the form of a yellow beetle car and the lead characters drive around in it, talking to it/him, experiencing various stunts, and getting him to help out with all kinds of tasks.
I would have liked to have seen John Cena take a more sustained role in this movie, and it would have been nice to get some additional good cast members involved too. Imagine if Cena had as much screen time as Jorge Lendeborg Jr (playing Memo, Charlie’s aspiring boyfriend). It could have been way more awesome but I guess that’s just not the genre this movie was going for – they wanted it childish and emo. For this reason I’m going to rate it Below Average, on a par with Transformers 3, thus declaring it joint weakest of all Transformers movies to date.
Sequel
Bumblebee (2018) was the sixth Transformers movie, and there’s been one more since – that’s Transformers 7: Rise Of The Beasts (2023). It comes with an entirely new cast of humans (yet again), plus the usual squad of Transformers, and a whole load of new ones too (the Beasts).
There’s a bit of a Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones vibe to this movie, which kicks in shortly after the first hour is done. The whole movie goes on for 2 and a half hours.
It’s good to see the return of Mark Wahlberg in the lead role, as Cade Yeager. This movie also features Anthony Hopkins as a supporting cast member called Sir Edmond Burton – he’s neither in a very major nor very minor role, but somewhere in between, and is listed second in the cast list in the closing credits, probably in part due to his level of fame. It’s good to see Josh Duhamel back as Colonel William Lennox. And the lead female this time called Viviane Wembley is played by Laura Haddock – she’s probably the best lead female in a Transformers movie thus far.
The best part of the movie is probably when Mark’s character cunjures a sword for himself long with the power to stop the swinging sword of one of the Earth-guardian transformers, thus saving Optmus Prime’s life when they’re about to execute him for betrayal even though he’s already realised his mistake. At that point, the guardians see Mark’s character has the amulet of King Arthur and they immediately recognise him as their leader. This only lasts a few seconds, but it’s probably the best part of the movie. The next best parts don’t last long either, which makes this movie quite thin considering it’s 2-and-a-half hours long. For this reason, even though this is one of the better Transformers movies – possibly even the best one to date – at least about as good as the first two – I’d still rate it pretty much Bang Average – on a par with most of the others, because the difference isn’t significant enough to justify distinct ratings, and the density of this one isn’t enough to justify a score of Above Average.
All Transformers movies ranked (up to this point)
If I had to rank all transformers movies thus far, I think I’d go 5, 4, 1, 2, 3. I’m confident in saying that movie 1 is slightly better than movie 2, and also that 5 is slightly better than 4, and that 3 is comfortably the worst of them all. But when it comes to 5 vs 1, that’s more of a style preference – do you prefer the originality of the movies 1 & 2, where the core concepts were first coined, or do you prefer the more powerful cast, magnificent script and less childish acting from movies 4 & 5? I’m tempted to go with the latter but it’s not a clear-cut decision by any means.
Transformers: Age Of Extinction (2014) is the fourth movie in the Transformers movie series. It has a better lead cast member in Mark Wahlberg, and its plot has a better level of originality & intrigue than the previous movie in the series. It’s also a bit more grown up – a bit less childish than those before it, at least to begin with, and not by much.
The final battle scene drags on a bit, much like the last movie, but I guess it’s a bit more multi-faceted this time.
I’m disappointed in how Optimus Prime convinced the old dinosaur transformers to help him – by telling them he will kill them if they don’t. What kind of leadership skills is this movie trying to teach our youth? What kind of a world is Hasbro trying to create with this type of tripe?
The tedius ending and the awful example of supposedly benevolent leadership, along with multiple instances of inappropriate, low-IQ emotional outbursts, come together to bring this movie back down to being roughly on a par with first couple of Transformers movies, although it’s still comfortably a bit better than the 3rd.
This movie is frequently quite childish, and is heavily banging the American military drums, but aside from that, it’s not a bad movie – it’s quite action packed from start to finish and has a decent basic story to it. The basic idea is, a bunch of sentient alien robots (Transformers) landed on Earth, and the good ones are battling the bad ones to save Earth and the human race from the destruction that the bad Transformers are planning.
Shia LaBeouf is officially star of the show; and Megan Fox plays his girlfriend who comes along for the ride most of the time, so is probably the second main character, officially. But in terms of charisma and screen presence there’s a few actors who stand out above both of them, including Josh Duhamel who plays the captain of the camouflaged military team operating in the Middle East; John Turturro who plays team leader in the secret Sector 7 agency, wearing a black beret; and funny guy Anthony Anderson who plays a useful hacker (who’s lost a lot of weight these days, but not at the time of this movie). Now if these three were the lead characters and it had less of a childish script, and it had a strong lead female added too, then it would probably be a significantly better movie, but as it stands I can’t rate it any better than Bang Average.
Peter Cullen‘s voice was also a notable feature in this movie, as the voice of Optimus Prime – leader of the benevolent side of Transformers.
Sequels
The first three Transformers movies are led by Shia LaBeouf.
The immediate sequel – the second movie in Hasbro’s Transformers movie series – is called Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (2009) and is pretty much the same quality as the original. It gets off to a better start but soon dwindles back down to the standard set by the original. It has a slightly new plot concept, but nothing significant. It has all the same cast members, and a very similar storyline, with another strong dose of pro-military persuasion. It’s equally childish, with a similar amount of decent action, although the action gets a bit more monotonous this time round I think. For this reason, and the fact it lacks the originality of the original, I would rate the second slightly weaker than the first, but by no significant margin – I’d rate them both Bang Average and suggest watching them sequentially for full context. One of the more interesting aspects of this movie is how Shia’s character goes into crazy genius mode from time to time, just like his grandfather did, drawing symbols on walls in the language of the Primes and debunking Einstein’s theories etc.
Third up, is Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), and while the first 90 minutes are drama-heavy, with occasional uncoordinated action, the final hour is a long final battle scene which brings the story together and rounds it off. Overall, this third movie lacks originality and creativity in plot and action, just like the second movie – probably worse. As such, I’m tempted to rate it Below Average, but it’s not significantly worse than a lot of movies rated Bang Average. Much of the cast is the same here, but the lead female has changed from Megan Fox (who’s nowhere to be seen here, she just disappeared from the storyline without explanation) to Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and I’d describe this change as going from bad to worse, which is representative of the movie as a whole since it’s a bit worse than the previous two. One of the more interesting aspects of this movie, is how the Decepticons attempt to control certain humans including Shia’s character by turning into unremovable torturesome wrist-watches.
After this initial trilogy starring Shia LaBeouf, the next couple of Transformers movies are led by Mark Wahlberg which I think is an improvement, then after a couple of movies with him, the series goes rapidly downhill, with a movie led by Hailee Steinfeld in 2018 followed by a movie led by Anthony Ramos in 2023.
Action Hero Movies