Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017)

Game info: Wikipedia.

{{ figure(src=“hzdartworkconcept_1.jpeg”, alt=“Artwork (not game footage) for Horizon Zero Dawn, from the press pack”) }}

This post contains SPOILERS.

Horizon Zero Dawn came out on Playstation in 2017. However, since I don't own a TV or games console I did not play it then. I did watch the Spoiler Warning playthrough of the game, and saw some trailers, and these were enough to get me interested in it.

This is not exactly a review because it just refers to stuff in the game without explaining it, so if you haven't played the game or watched a Let's Play or something then you probably won't be able to understand it. It's more like a post-game debrief for myself.

Graphics and Technical

Horizon Zero Dawn looks amazing. Maybe I'm just not used to modern graphics, but it just looked really gorgeous to me. The environments are pretty varied across the world you play in, particularly when including the Frozen Wilds DLC (which I did). It has day/night cycle and varying weather, though I would have maybe preferred if they'd adjusted the day/night cycle to make the nights a little shorter relative to the days, and adjusted the weather to make the torrential rain a little less frequent.

I played in April 2021 on PC (on Linux, via Proton), and as I expected from what I'd seen in protondb I had some performance problems but the game was playable. This was on a Ryzen 1700x with an NVidia 1060 GTX card.

For performance reasons I had to play on the lowest graphics settings, and I also enabled the game's dynamic resolution feature. Dynamic resolution doesn't affect UI elements, but lets the game ramp down the resolution of internal render buffers to try to hit a target framerate. I set the target framerate to 30 fps, and mostly the game resolution seemed fine, but I definitely did see significant resolution drops occasionally (eg, 2% of the time or something). Framerate as judged by the game's responsiveness and playability did stay pretty solid almost all the time – there were just a handful of areas in the game where it slowed down or got a bit juddery despite the dynamic resolution. The cauldron areas were particularly bad for this; I guess it is some specific lighting setup they have in those areas, or maybe something to do with smoke/steam effects.

Gameplay: Fighting robot animals

So good. Really fun. Having said that, I found it a bit overwhelming at times with some combinations of enemies in some locations. I was playing on normal difficulty and I think perhaps they ramped up the amount of enemies you have to fight just a little too much in some places. But maybe I'm just bad at it.

Notes for players: You really have to learn for each enemy what its attacks are, how those attacks are telegraphed, and when and what direction to dodge in to avoid each attack. That way you can avoid enough of the hits to avoid being overwhelmed. I found that once I started taking hits things quickly became really frustrating, because even though I usually had enough health + health refills + health potions to tank a lot of damage, when you get hit it massively reduces your mobility and control (Aloy staggers from the hit, etc) and this is enough that I sometimes found it difficult to get back on top of the fight. You also really have to learn for each enemy what combination of element attacks/effects and what weapons to use to be able to take the thing down quickly.

Learning those things isn't that hard – the enemy attacks are telegraphed really strongly, the codex/notebook tells you the key things you need to know about what each enemy is weak to, and so on. Be prepared to switch between weapons a bunch to take down a single enemy though. For example, in the DLC the end boss is the Fireclaw, which is very large and has really tough armor so if you can't do damage quickly enough then you'll be fighting one of them for ages just to finish it – difficult and frustrating because the Fireclaw's attacks are devastating if you don't manage to dodge them. But, for the Fireclaw, if you have a (DLC-specific) weapon that's fully upgraded then you can hit them with Freeze quickly enough to actually make a difference and then do enough damage with the ice shards (or whatever that thing is) to take them out reasonably quickly. They're still a tough enemy, but getting the right combination of element and then the right damage attack makes a massive difference to how long it takes to finish and therefore how long you need to keep up close-to-perfect dodging.

Fun story: When I started playing the game I hadn't found the dodge/roll key so I was trying to avoid all the enemy's attacks by running, and... yeah, that doesn't really work. I mean, it kinda works in early game, but quickly reaches its limit, and is super frustrating.

Movement and positioning during the fights is pretty important, so you need to keep some situational awareness to make sure that you don't get boxed into a corner or into a place where dodge-rolls fail. Also if you need to run and break line of sight you need to know where you can go. And for some enemies you want to be able to control your distance to them because they have different near/mid/far range attacks and you may want to influence which of those they're gonna go for.

The heavy weapons dropped by a few of the biggest enemies are pretty fun and help change the style of fight a bit. Particularly because you move quite slowly when you pick one up (and picking one up takes significant time) and you drop the thing if you dodge-roll, so sometimes you need to draw the enemy away from the weapon it dropped so that you can run back around and pick it up with enough distance to avoid an attack while you're grabbing it.

One annoying thing: You carry health potions (three types), “resist” potions which give you some resistance to elemental effects (four types), traps (three types), rocks for causing distrations, and also have a couple of actions (calling your mount and making a noise to attract attention) and these are all on one action bar that you cycle through one by one. It is a pain. I didn't find the traps useful at all (just use the tripcaster instead which does basically the same thing but better in every way). I didn't find the rocks useful at all, though maybe someone playing stealth more would? I found the attract-attention thing useful occasionally but not very often. Calling a mount was useful occasionally. Health potions are super useful in the middle of a fight and I was forever triggering the wrong potion because it was really difficult to correctly cycle to the right one while trying to continuously move, dodge-roll to avoid attacks, and maintain situational awareness. Resist potions are useful immediately prior to a fight if you plan your initial attack well but if the fight isn't over very quickly then you'll want resist potions again during the fight. There are just way too many items you have to cycle through, stepping through them is a pain (I think the next-item/previous-item key is actually slow to respond somehow?), you can't do it blind so you have to look down in the corner of the screen to watch what you're switching to, and unlike the ammo wheel which puts the game into slow motion when you use it, there is no slow motion for picking these items.

The ammo wheel worked pretty well, by the way. I did find I was pretty bad at actually flipping directly to the ammo type that I wanted. You can also switch between ammo types for your weapon by hitting the number key for that weapon slot to cycle ammo types, and that is ok since there are only three or fewer ammo types per weapon. Except occasionally it wouldn't switch types for some reason, like it just seemed kind of flaky; that was annoying.

Gameplay: Skills, Leveling, Inventory, Collectables

I did not 100% the game but I got pretty close, including the DLC, and I had got max level and all skills before I triggered the final part of the main quest.

The collectables were fine... not very interesting but it gives you something to aim for and if you get all of them you'll visit lots of places on the map which is good (because the game is gorgeous and you should totally walk around and enjoy that!). I bought the collectable maps, because there's no way in hell that I would manually hunt around every square foot of that huge world to find everything.

The skill points were mostly good although I feel like the mount and machine override combat focused points are kind of useless. Maybe that was supposed to be a bigger part of the game and some ideas were dropped? Machine override is mostly useful in rare special cases and because if you can sneak up on a big machine you may not be able to do a silent takedown (even if you have silent strike & its powerup skill you may not be able to kill a big thing in one attack), but as far as I can tell if you start overriding a machine that hasn't detected you then it'll just always let you complete without detection. Of course, you have to unlock all the machine overrides to be able to do that. Anyway, overriding stuff isn't fun – fighting stuff is fun! I never even tried the attack-from-your-mount thing...

Some people like to be able to get all skills, some people think if you can get all skills then there's no meaningful choice and that players should be forced to make a trade-off, e.g., choosing to either focus on stealth or focus on attack strength or defence or whatever. Personally I hate making decisions and I hate feeling like something has been cut off from me, so I'm in the loser group that just wants to unlock everything. At least if you have the DLC then you can unlock everything, so that worked out fine for me.

Leveling was fine. Each level gives you +10 hitpoints and with the DLC max level is 60 so you get 600 extra hitpoints across the course of the game. That's from memory anyway; those numbers might be off. Anyway, that does make a huge difference to how much you can tank. Levels also come with skill points (but other things give skill points too).

Inventory management in HZD is kind of a pain. Several little things here: – You need to upgrade your inventory size several times for several different non-mixable inventories (ammo, modifications, resources, etc). Upgrading your inventory requires animal based resources which I don't think(?) you can buy, so you need to hunt animals to upgrade your inventory sizes. I'm somewhat ok with this but some of the drops you need are pretty rare which gets annoying. One thing needed goose bones or something – geese are rare and fly away if you approach them; I had to go find a guide online for where the hell I should go to find geese, and even then I needed to make several attempts bouncing around between campfires to trigger the geese to respawn and each time climbing up to the cliff area they spawn at before I could get the single item I needed. So... eh. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It wouldn't necessarily be better if upgrading the inventory sizes was just always trivially easy or wasn't needed at all; hunting can be a fun activity. I think maybe some of the drop frequencies should be adjusted though. – Explicitly hunting robots just to get resources for crafting or trading seems really tedious because although fighting robots is kind of fun, the resource drops are pretty small. The most generic resource is 'shards' which is the main currency but is also used directly in crafting some types of ammo. I hit some points in the game where I was struggling to keep enough shards. I think selling unwanted resources and mods is the better way to get shards? But then you've got to bounce around to traders to sell stuff, and it's kind of a pain. – There's some loading-screen tip or something that tells you to check out every individual trader because different traders have different stuff. I did not do that, because who the hell has time for that!? – I pretty frequently hit my maximum modification inventory space. Getting rid of mods is a bit annoying because then you either have to accept sub-optimal mods or you have to spend a bunch of time swapping mods to try to get the best set equipped (so that you're making the most of the weapons you have) and then dump the rest, and you maybe don't want to dump the rest completely because you might get a better weapon that has more mod slots and... eh, it's just a bit fiddly. If you're the kind of person who loves min-maxing that kind of thing then maybe it's good? I'm not sure how I would change it. It seems the mods are semi-randomised because they have combinations of effects, like +9% handling +5% fire or whatever. There can be several mods that are kind of comparable but have different combinations so it's not obvious which is best; it depends which weapon you put it on and what your play style is. Anyway, it's not a big deal but maybe it could be simplified somehow. – In the mid/late game it takes way too long to collect enough herbs to fill your weed pouch or whatever the health thing is called. I will note that this is way different in the DLC where a bunch of medicine weed gives you +60% instead of, like, +24% max in the main game. But that doesn't change the main game numbers that is only in the DLC area itself. It's annoying (outside the DLC) because it's not difficult or fun to fill that bar up, it's just tedious. You can't buy this stuff either, though I don't care so much about that since I don't particularly like buying stuff.

Gameplay: Fighting humans

The style of play when fighting human enemies is very different to the style of play when fighting robot dinosaurs. Humans are much smaller, they use ranged attacks and don't use motion so much, elemental effects don't matter so much, they don't have individual nodes or pieces of armor you can knock off, they generally can't take very much damage.

The Spoiler Warning crew complained a lot about fighting humans, but I thought it was basically fine. This is maybe because I like stealth games too and for most of the human fights I used stealth tactics rather than just wading in. HZD is definitely not an amazing stealth game, but you can do the basic thing of moving around slowly, staying out of sight, and doing silent takedowns or sniping individuals to gradually work your way through a base.

It's definitely not as frenetic or fun as the robot fights and doesn't have the fast paced fighting element to it – it's much “shallower” mechanically, I think. But it's ok. I think it's good to have it as a way of providing variation in the game. As noted at the top of this post I put over 95 hours into HZD, and that's only possible because the game has several different things you can be doing: Fighting robots, exploring the gorgeous game world, fighting humans, exploring the old-world/exposition dungeons, quest stuff, etc. If it was all fighting robots then it could not sustain 95+ hours of play.

Story & Exposition Dungeons

“Exposition dungeon” is what the Spoiler Warning crew called these things, and it's a perfect name. I have two reactions here: One, I liked the HZD story. Ok, it's not sophisticated perhaps, but it's a powerful concept – all life wiped out, humans have to start from scratch. Two, I disliked the exposition dungeons.

For me, the biggest problem with the old-world ruin areas is that they are totally monochrome and it's really difficult to see or understand what you're looking at. And yes, ok, I get that this is supposed to be stuff from 1000 years ago or something, I guess it's, what? fossilised? Certainly totally rusted and so on. But that also makes no sense because a bunch of the computers are still working and active. Fossilised computers don't work. So it's this weird unexplained mixture of technology that works way better than it possibly could, combined with visuals showing everything being kind of fused together and covered in stalagtites/stalagmites, and all monochrome.

The second biggest problem with the old-world ruin areas is that they've just got too much exposition all packed densely together. There's a whole load of text content that I didn't read. I lost focus and couldn't pay attention to all the audio logs (not sure I found all of them? I found most, think I missed a couple). Partly that's probably because I was playing this in really long sessions at the weekends and some evenings, so of course I just can't concentrate for that long at a stretch. And partly it's just the way my mind works in general – I can't focus on what people are saying for that long even at the best of times. But partly it's because there's just too much of that stuff all closely packed together so you get it all at once.

I have no clue how any humans still exist in HZD. The “teaching” module, Apollo, was destroyed, so the humans that were spawned in the mountain bases only got the most basic education – nursery or primary school level stuff. And then when all the food ran out they were dumped out unceremoniously (as teenagers or young adults) into the completely wild and robot-infested world – a world they had no prior experience of – and had to learn how to survive. That is... really tough. It's not clear how many people were in those initial populations, but the implication from the structure of the womb of the mountain seems like they would have been tiny, maybe just tens of individuals (unfortunately I think game production constrained things a bit – the base shows many gestation pods and school pods, maybe it could have been a couple of hundred people? but the hologram videos show like 6 people or something, presumably because they couldn't reasonably write and animate a big group). With zero parental guidance about how to survive in that environment, I find it pretty difficult to imagine them not all dying before reaching a self sustaining population. And then there's the problem of genetic diversity in such a small group. I'm not sure why I find that harder to swallow than the overall premise of AI war robots destroying all life and AI controlled systems building everything back from zero... I guess because that side is all just taken on faith as the premise of the story, whereas questions of human behaviour and capabilities seem like something that can be judged against the real world.

Characters

Aloy is great. I love how sarcastic she can be, without being just a horrible person. I think they made her the right level of badass.

Lansra and Resh are kind of comic-book level of antagonistic toward Aloy. But they have little enough screen time that it's ok. You love to hate them.

Erend is surprisingly great – for a “dumb”/meat-head kind of guy he's actually really sweet and self-aware. Several of the Oseram are pretty good actually. The Oseram weapon lady in the DLC (whose name I have forgotten) is hilarious, and so is the Oseram woman who asks you to go find her missing husband. The Oseram surnames (“Delverson”) are ridiculous. The Oseram guy you meet in the defunct hydroelectric power station in the DLC is really annoying but also he's so funny that he actually managed to get my past my annoyance with him and I ended up liking him. So basically the Oseram are good.

The Sun King (Avad) is kind of annoying. He doesn't have enough depth to him. Why is he such a good guy? Seems like someone like that would just be a total pushover, but he doesn't seem to have many problems as Sun King – not like he's under constant threat of assassination or mutiny or something due to how “weak” he's perceived to be.

The Banuk shaman who drinks robot “blood” is... I mean, he's totally nuts, obviously. Fun character though. I like the way Aloy reacts to him – she doesn't use him exactly but she also doesn't try to protect him from himself or anything.

Cyan, the AI in the DLC, is pretty neat. There's a bit of general exposition that you get through talking to Cyan, and it's done through dialog options which feels a bit better than some of the exposition dungeon non-interactive audio logs.

Sylens is... eh. I don't like him. How did he work out so much stuff? I mean, ok sure he's driven by his curiosity and is smart, but... he somehow repaired a Focus device in the first place? I dunno, his technical abilities don't seem to really be justified properly, even after finding out that he's basically been interrogating Hades for years. Consider how technology works today in the real world – integrated circuits are not repairable. At all. By anyone. They are fabricated in a process that requires the cleanest cleanrooms and the most expensive manufacturing equipment, and some really horrible chemicals. Anyway, Sylens just seems like a comic-book villain. I didn't find him at all believable even within the context of the game.

Ted Faro is, I dunno. I mean, wow, that guy didn't just create world-ending robots, he then decided to get religion (just generally, not some specific religion) and then he destroyed the repository of all human knowledge that was supposed to give future humans a useful starting point, and then he killed everyone on the leadership team of the Zero Dawn project. And yet despite all that, they didn't make Ted Faro evil, they just... gave him really really bad judgement I guess? And an absolute ton of hubris. This is going to sound nuts, but I think Ted Faro is a much more believable character than Sylens.

There are a bunch more characters but I'm not going to list them all. I like many of the minor characters in HZD. Nil was great.

Tags: #reviews

description = "Solid and fun open world action game. Hooked me for 95+ hours."

Review of Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

Film info: Wikipedia, IMDB. The film is based on a manga series which I have not read.

{{ figure(src=“alita_poster.jpeg” alt=“Poster art for Alita: Battle Angel” ) }}

This review contains SPOILERS (a lot of them).

I enjoyed it! I would count it as a solid cyberpunk action film, though not a hugely impactful one either emotionally or philosophically. The technology and setting of the world raises lots of very interesting questions but the film is decidedly not trying to answer them; that's just not something it's interested in. The film moves forward pretty reliably through its plot, which is constructed well enough but doesn't inspire me.

For me, the strongest aspect of the film is the central character of Alita, backed up by an interesting world (interesting to me even if the film doesn't care much about exploring it). Even though the other aspects of the film aren't amazing they pull their weight—-there isn't really any part that felt jarring or got in the way for me.

Rosa Salazar did a great job. I imagine acting for CGI is pretty tough. I also really liked Ed Skrein as Zapan, and Mahershala Ali as Vector (particularly for his strong transitions to Vector-controlled-by-Nova). Jennifer Connelly didn't have much to work with; could probably have been a very interesting character but the film didn't have time to explore that. Christoph Waltz was Christoph Waltz; Ido was fine but spent most of his time being fatherly (which I thought they did well – it wasn't over done) or just providing exposition. Keean Johnson as Hugo was probably the weakest main character for me; his character had very strong goals, but the motivation for those goals wasn't explored in any depth.

The CGI is pretty good. Alita mostly stays on the safe side of uncanny-valley. That is, she looks CGI but she doesn't look freaky so it's fine. Her teeth/mouth are kind of weird when she smiles widely though.

Alita is tough and self confident in her physicality, without being a generic 'bad-ass' who sees romance or emotional vulnerability as being a weakness. It's also good that her physical confidence is shown pretty early, certainly in the kids motorball scrimmage but even before that when she instinctively goes into a fighting stance when the Centurion walks toward her, and saves the little dog from being crushed by accident. Some films with a secret bad-ass girl who doesn't know her own powers keep them weak and unconfident right up until they're suddenly forced to fight and find that they're invincible. But Alita clearly has confidence from the beginning, even though she doesn't know the extent of her skills.

When Ido talks about his daughter, there's an exchange:

{% screenplay %} Alita: Did you find peace? \ Ido: I found you. \ Alita: I'm not your daughter. {% end %}

I think the reading of the line “I'm not your daughter” stands out in a good way. She's not being mean or accusing him of something. The line comes across as gentle, slightly sad, but also direct, firm and honest. Something Ido needed to be told, and also something he seems to accept. I thought it was a really nice moment.

I think she falls for Hugo too easily. I can somewhat forgive it for her being a teenager, but then is she really intended to be a teenager? Unclear. Ido initially thinks she is, and she behaves like it in various ways, but when she gets the battle suit and it adjusts to her own body image, Nurse Gerhad notes that she's older than Ido thought (she grows boobs; it's actually pretty funny). And of course she actually used to be an URM Berserker. Did URM use child soldiers? I feel like she should be at least a young adult, but then if so she should be a bit more mature in her behaviour from the start, and probably shouldn't immediately go doe-eyed at the first pretty boy she sees. It doesn't make sense to me that she would act more like a little girl just because she woke up in a little girl's body.

Speaking of waking up in a little girl's body, Alita is totally unperturbed by waking up in a body she doesn't recognise, a body that doesn't fit her subconscious self-image, being notably younger than her true self. She also seems pretty unperturbed by having no memories at all, and when she's told that she's over 300 years old that doesn't seem to cause her any kind of concern. To a large extent I'm happy to ignore how un-freaked-out she is about her strange situation—-the film doesn't want to spend time on her being freaked out, plus she's a pretty confident person and freaking out isn't necessarily in character. On the other hand I feel like she could have expressed a stronger and clearer desire to find out about herself; asking Ido more stuff and pushing him harder early on to help her find out who she is. If finding out her history is a significant motivator for her (until her motivation transitions to destroy Zalem/kill Nova) then perhaps that should be more apparent.

It was really weird seeing Jai Courtney show up for like one second for a character that was pointed out by Hugo as the most likely motorball final champion. Probably no one else found it weird, I guess Jai Courtney is not that well known, I just happened to recognise him. Actually I think I misrecognised him and was thinking of Channing Tatum. Sorry Jai. Sorry Channing.

Also weird seeing Edward Norton (uncredited according to imdb??) playing Nova at the end. Why wasn't he credited? He was only on screen for a few seconds, with I think no words at all. Anyway, weird. I assume they wanted him as a hook to be used in the sequel but I guess there won't be a sequel. Which sucks, because Alita totally deserves a sequel just to get more of Rosa Salazar.

Hugo's redemption arc isn't very clear. It feels like he is intended to have a redemption arc: He falls for Alita, realises that mugging people for parts is wrong (or just realises Alita wouldn't like it if she found out?), quits his gang, and when he gets shredded by the defence ring and is about to fall to his death, he thanks Alita for saving him. I guess that could be taken to be “thanks for saving me from Zapan” or “thanks for saving me from the path I was on”, but I'm assuming its the latter. But although his decision to quit the gang is shown, the motivational change that drives that decision is not shown very effectively.

More generally, I think Hugo just has weaker characterisation than Alita does. And that's a pity, because he has the background for a strong motivational and emotional arc. It looks like they have everything they need to build an interesting character but didn't have the time or combo of writing/directing/acting to pull it off. Clearly he's dead set on getting to Zalem, as he sees it as the way out of his shitty life down in Iron City. But then it doesn't seem like his life is actually too tough – we don't see him struggling for food, he has enough money to get a nice leather jacket and keep a motorbike-wheel-thing, he can buy Alita chocolate when he wants, he clearly has friends. So is he just ambitious, feeling like he's destined for more and that getting to Zalem is the only way to achieve that? When he quits his gang that's apparently not the result of giving up on his prior dream so he can be with Alita in Zalem, because when he gets his cyborg body he tries to walk up the cargo delivery tubes.

After Alita has her battle-body and sneaks into Hugo's place, it's pretty weird offering her heart to him. Even if she (thinks she) loves him, that heart is totally unique and an intrinsic part of her. It's not even clear that she can drive her URM body without her URM heart; I would assume it takes more power than a normal cyber-body. It feels like such a weird scene, it's like Alita is ignoring her own motivations and desires (finding out more about who she is, for example) all for a “love” that doesn't really have a reason except for her being a dumb teenager. In fact it feels so weird that I wonder if Alita actually isn't sure Hugo can be trusted and is baiting him to see if he'll sell her out. She switches really suddenly into that intense teenage-girl infatuation driven “I'd do anything for you, I'd give you my heart!” thing and then switches back out again suddenly once Hugo refuses her heart. Of course, he then does sell her out by getting her to try out for Motorball, but perhaps he doesn't know it's a setup. Anyway probably the whole “I'd give you my heart” thing is just a very dumb, unsubtle declaration of love. Kind of over-the-top.

Later when Alita saves Hugo from Zapan, she does the whole “I'd give my life for his” thing again, and it's kind of dumb. She just has no reason to love him like that. She could love him and still have a reason to live that doesn't revolve around him. She could love him and want to save him and still want to live for herself. The whole thing of being willing to immediately give her life for his feels weak, because there's no motivation for her to feel so strongly about him.

Since Alita doesn't actually seem like a bloodthirsty person it's a little surprising that she enjoys Motorball so much as a spectator, seeing people getting ripped apart. Wanting to participate makes more sense since she's a bit of a thrill-seeker, and playing Motorball provides opportunities to make money or get to Zalem. Perhaps cyborgs getting torn up just doesn't count and is just considered to good clean fun?

When Vector meets Hugo and his gang to pick up the grind-cutters, and Hugo takes his goggles and mask off, it's supposed to be this big reveal, but it's pretty obvious it's going to be Hugo. He just ditched Alita at the Motorball game, right after Chiren and Vector were talking about taking the grind-cutters to use for Grewishka, he goes off with his gang right then. It's not jarring, it's just not surprising; it fell flat.

Where are the rebels? It seems like everyone thinks that life is totally wonderful for the people in Zalem and shitty and hard for the people in Iron City. Where is the graffiti from people who hate Zalem for keeping everyone down? Where are the people saying “fuck Zalem we're better off down here where at least we're free to be human”? Everyone seems to either have an ambition to get into Zalem, or to just accept their lot in life and that Zalem is wonderful and not the enemy.

Why do people think that becoming Motorball Champion will get them into Zalem? Clearly nothing else does, and Zalem is 100% exploiting everyone, so why would they believe that Zalem actually honours any commitments about bringing the winning champion into the sky city? Given how obviously evil Zalem is, I just don't see why anyone would trust that propaganda.

Actually it's implied that Zalem is not so awesome in terms of freedom at least, since Ido and Chiren were kicked out for having a disabled child, but that's irrelevant to what the general populace thinks. Why does Chiren still want to get back to Zalem?

The world depicted is pretty violent and harsh, but it is not particularly gory, presumably due to targeting a 12A rating. For me this is a positive thing; I'm not into torture porn or spraying blood and guts everywhere. There is some cyber-blood and some cyber-faces getting smashed up or sliced up, but mostly it's pretty clean. It's not clear how much pain people feel when their cyber-bodies are damaged... I didn't notice much screaming.

When Ido goes to get the bounty after Alita takes out the first ripper gang, why does he only get the bounty for one of the gang, not the Bioshock Splicer looking guy? Did that guy not have a bounty? If so, will murdering him come back to bite anyone? I guess not.

In the flashback when Ido talks about his daughter's death, he says “Alita couldn't get out of the way fast enough” but it really doesn't look like she was actually in the way in the first place; the door is to her right, not behind her.

Pretty lucky that there's exactly one perfectly protected and preserved battle-ready cyber-body prepped and ready to go in the URM ship when Alita goes there!

I really want to learn more about URM and the war. Given what we see of Zalem (plus Alita's background herself), it seems unlikely that URM were actually the bad guys.

It's kind of nice that Alita does the whole speech of “I came to ask for your help” with the bounty hunters. Her physical confidence and skill does not come with unexplained street-smarts; instead she's actually fairly naive. Though perhaps so naive that she didn't expect a fight... it certainly seemed like she was looking for one when she started insulting all of the hunters.

Can't believe they let Grewishka kill the little dog :anguished:

Dislike the end-titles music.

Tags: #reviews

description = "A solid but not very impactful CGI-enhanced cyperbunk action story. Enjoyable, and keeps its violence pretty clean (rated 12A). A strong and likeable lead character makes it worth watching, though the plot is not inspiring. I liked it."