This isn’t an easy watch, primarily because what makes the activists angry-police brutality, inequality, bureaucratic injustice, pointless wars-are still making people angry today, 44 years down the line. Punishment Park is critical both of the regime oh-so-close to the real one of 1971, and of the activists turning to violence as a means to bring peace. Most everyone chooses the park, where trigger-happy cops and soldiers lie in wait. (It played at one New York cinema for four days before it was pulled.) In the California desert, a group of young activists are given an option: Go to jail, or go to Punishment Park, and run to the American flag planted 50 miles away over scorching sands before the police catch you first. Pseudo-documentary-style surveyor of both past and future Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park is willfully confrontational-it’s why Hollywood studios refused to distribute the film on release. For fans of futuristic sci-fi/action, it should provide an engaging if somewhat forgettable experience. Rodriguez pushes the confines of the PG-13 rating to create some genre- and source-material-appropriate hack-and-slash gruesomeness with a significant amount of cyborg bodies split in half, decapitated and torn to pieces. When the fighting finally begins, Battle Angel gets its metallic ass in gear. The future world that Battle Angel inhabits is the lovechild of Blade Runner and Mad Max, a grimy post-apocalyptic city that’s also a grand, overpopulated cyberpunk metropolis. Just like a cyborg version of Jason Bourne, she doesn’t remember her past, but has supreme ass-kicking instincts, leading Ito to suspect some sinister military use in her past. Her brain is human, but the rest of her is artificial. Ito finds during his junk hunt and brings back to life. The story follows Alita (Rosa Salazar), whom Dr. That anime is barely an hour long, yet manages to pack in a sprawling cyberpunk universe with a deep and complex lore that supports whatever over-the-top tech fetish cyber action it throws at you. Based on the popular manga, Gunnm, Alita: Battle Angel mostly takes its visual cues and narrative structure from a 1993 anime adaptation by the same name. Considering the talent involved, it’s not surprising that the finished product is a frequently fun and kinetic, visually pleasing sci-fi/actioner, albeit one that doesn’t have a single new or fresh part embedded in it. Ito, director Robert Rodriguez and co-writer/co-producer James Cameron sift through the remnants of established sci-fi and cyberpunk properties in order to glue together a recognizable and cohesive narrative within the confines of its genre. What better way to start a film than with a metaphor about itself? Just like Dr.
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This may not be escapism, but as the increasing number of dystopian movies, novels and TV series prove, we remain captivated by stories of societies gone wrong and the struggle of individuals to overcome.Īlita: Battle Angel begins with Dyson Ito (Christoph Waltz), doctor to cyborgs, scavenging through a junkyard full of spare parts in order to find anything he can use. That’s left a still very wide swath of cinema to consider, from sci-fi looks into the distant future to cautionary tales of a much more recognizable world in our present or even past.
We’ve also eliminated post-apocalyptic films where society hasn’t been rebuilt to the point of a functioning government. For our purposes here, we’ve focused on Earth, eliminating films where the threat is from another planet. Dystopian societies are marked by mass suffering and great injustice, and we don’t always have to look for fiction to see examples. Not to be confused with post-apocalyptic films (though the two may overlap), dystopian films deal with a decidedly human threat from those in control. It’s natural for us to explore those what-if scenarios in film, something we’ve been doing since at least 1932 when Fritz Lang brought Metropolis to life. As oppressive regimes across the globe turn to technology to control their populaces-and we see our own government putting kids in cages and eroding privacies we’ve long taken for granted-we get a glimpse the terrifying possibilities of where we may be headed. That dystopian movies have become a genre all their own speaks to our fears of the future.