Review of Alita: Battle Angel
Directed by Robert Rodriguez; starring Rosa Salazar and Christoph Waltz
One cannot but approach Alita: Battle Angel with a certain amount of apprehension. The original anime, made by Yukito Kishiro, was not short of cybernetic action but at its heart was a surprisingly tender love story. The new version is twice as long, incredibly expensive, and directed by Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, El Mariachi), a fellow not known for subtlety. The movie’s trailers hint at a series of spectacularly pointless CGI fight scenes. Even more, Hollywood’s last attempt to make a blockbuster out of an anime, Ghost in the Shell, was an extended exercise in largely missing the point.
But as it turns out Rodriguez (overseen by producer James Cameron) does a pretty good job of keeping the essence of the source material while adding the best that modern technology has to offer. Rosa Salazar, who has previously appeared mainly in supporting roles in so-so films, turns in a solid performance, although with CGI-enlarged eyes and a metallic body she does not always have much to work with.
The cyborg Alita, or at least a small part of her, is rescued from the scrap heap by compassionate Doctor Ido (Christoph Waltz), and while her memory is gone she soon reveals the talents of a super soldier. This allows Rodriguez to stage a succession of truly remarkable fights and races, and there are plenty of villains – uber-sleeze Mahershala Ali, smooth-talking Ed Skrein, and snarling Jackie Earle Haley – to contend with. There is also Jennifer Connelly, who was grown out of her pretty-girl looks into an interesting character actress – although here she comes to a very unpleasant end. Salazar manages to balance Alita’s cybernetic strength and human frailty as she struggles to define herself. There is even some fun along the way, such as her first encounter with an orange, and later with chocolate.
And the visual look of the movie is undeniably stunning, whether it is the background details of Iron City or the hi-tech savagery of the Motorball stadium. In a tiny but beautiful scene, Alita slices a tear in half as it falls. There is a note at the end of the credits that the movie required hundreds of thousands of hours of work, and that sounds credible.
The weakest point of the movie is Keean Johnson, as Alita’s crush interest Hugo. He is hunky but rather bland; the character in the anime version had more depth, and his obsession with reaching the sky city of Zalem made sense. With Johnson it feels more like a plot device, a sudden change of mind to provide a conclusion. In fact, the whole movie begins to struggle in its final stages, perhaps because of the need to provide a pathway to the inevitable sequel.
Alita might not be the triumph that its makers wanted but it is still a success, and it is good to see another movie (after, for example, Bumblebee) in which it is a complex young woman who does the rescuing and the sacrificing, the fighting and the thinking. Hollywood does not always get the emotional tone right but in Alita Rodriguez and Cameron did not get it wrong, either.
Alibaba, founded in 1999 by tech-entrepreneur Jack Ma, recorded a net income of 61.41 billion yuan, approximately US$9.6 billion, in the year ending 31 March 2018, and its market cap puts it firmly in the global top ten. A new book by its Chief Strategy Officer Dr Ming Zeng explains how Alibaba’s model was developed and how it keeps the company on a growth path.
In the television series Breaking Bad, what business do the perpetrators buy to launder drug money?
Zeng is the Chief Strategy Officer of Alibaba Group, a company that has leveraged technology into an incredibly successful position. That success, says Zeng, is based on understanding how technology can put direct interaction with customers at the centre of the enterprise. He calls this the customer-to-business (C2B) model, using feedback loops to drive machine learning, with customer demands and responses incorporated into the system in real time.
A danger is paralysis through analysis. The critical third step is to be willing to move ahead even if you do not have all the information. Collect and digest about 70 per cent of the data, suggests Perell, and then go with your gut.
operatives, going back to the Federation era. Fahey takes the view that covert activities demonstrate the real thinking of political leaders, and if that is true then the early leaders of Australia were an independently-minded lot. In fact, the first real intelligence operation was against the British, trying to manipulate them into opposing French expansion in the South Pacific. There was a series of other operations, often run on an informal but nevertheless effective basis, over the next few decades, and all of it makes remarkable reading.
for the idea (especially because the New Zealanders had already done it, and the vote had been given to women in South Australia without the sky falling in). The road was much harder in Britain, where many of the Australian women became involved with the bruising battle. Wright believes that the Australian experience was a crucial element in winning the right to vote in Britain and elsewhere, and it is hard to disagree.
players. The nadir of the season was the ball-tampering scandal, and Haigh devotes several columns to analysing it. He concludes that it was due, at least in part, to the win-at-all-costs culture of the Australian team (and the administrators and money-men behind the players) and the intense competition between the different forms of the game. He believes that Australian cricket will recover from the disaster but it will take a while and will require some deep reflection.
narrative skipping across a number of locations, held together by wannabe novelist Pippa (her name used to be Narelle but she changed it for marketing reasons). Most of the characters have more pretensions than talents, as well as a pettiness that straddles cultural differences and generations. They see fame as an entitlement, not realising that success requires work. De Kretser walks a fine line between satirising them and indulging them, leavening the intensity of her writing with an undercurrent of humour and, in the end, affection. This reviewer does not always agree with the people who give out awards for writing but here it is deserved.
much can be crammed into the short-story space. Corrango, by Jennifer Mills, stays with the reader precisely because so little is explained.
completely out of money at one point, has struggled with booze, and was jailed for contempt after naming accused paedophiles. His war on paedophiles is a constant theme running through his career although on other subjects he is all over the place. But he works hard to understand the issues and he takes the responsibility of the job seriously. So the taxpayer is probably getting their money’s worth, which is more than can be said for many other senators. Hinch pens interesting portraits of those he has encountered although his nasty streak occasionally grates. His disdain for Pauline Hanson is exceeded only by his dislike for Gillian Triggs, with whom he traded barbs in committee hearings.
arrogance, cannot be doubted, but often Donnelly’s temper is greater than his temperance. He raises many important points, especially about the influence of the Left in the education system, only to bury them as he jumps into another attack. What was needed here was a strong editorial hand to keep him focused. This is not a bad book but a cooler head would have made it a much better one.
Tuff and Goldbach, senior figures in Deloitte Consulting, have seen many established companies flounder when trying to deal with change, and they have reached the conclusion that ‘best practices’ are part of the problem more than part of the solution. In an earlier era, the idea of doing what had succeeded before made sense but in a time of constant disruption it is the path to failure. Even more, they say, the relatively slow speed of marketplace change allowed wasteful habits to continue without consequence. No longer.
avoid techno-babble in favour of a real-world perspective.
Large parts of the Internet seem to have descended into meaningless chatter but the TED Talks site stand out as a beacon of clarity and relevance. Anderson, the curator of the site, is adamant about the importance of clear communication, and in this book (recently re-released) he provides advice on everything from organising content to setting up a lectern.
He asks employees to examine the relationship between their individual purpose, the purpose of the organisation, and their role within it. Do you really aspire to the position of the boss, or is it merely what you have been told you should do? If you get there, what will you do to improve the organisation and society? Is there another direction that might be more satisfying? Difficult questions, but necessary.
