The cult of ‘Alita: Battle Angel’ – alt-right parable or neglected classic?

In May, the official Twitter account for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, home of the Oscars, asked its followers to name the one movie they felt needed to be seen in a cinema. One Twitter user suggested Alita: Battle Angel, James Cameron’s passion project from earlier this year about an amnesiac robot girl who awakens in a poverty-ravaged future-world and slowly rediscovers her inner and outer strength.

And it was an unusual pick, considering how rapidly the Robert Rodriguez-directed dystopian action fantasy – co-scripted and produced by Cameron himself – appeared to drop out of cultural consciousness upon its release in February. But even stranger was a second Twitter account suggesting Alita: Battle Angel as the film most in need of a cinema viewing. Then a third, and then a fourth. The surge followed from there, until thousands of Alita fans, some with avatars depicting the cyborg-girl herself, swarmed the thread, determined to get the word out about a film they believed was cruelly snubbed upon its release.

And that unexpected Alita devotion has only become more pronounced in the months since, Twitter accounts for sites such as Collider and Rotten Tomatoes have witnessed the same voracious Alita support. So much so that it’s become something of a meme in itself, driven by the oddness of an incredibly vocal and mobilised fan community coalescing around something seemingly forgotten by everyone outside of it.

These fans call themselves #AlitaArmy, congregate on YouTube and Reddit, and typically possess an oddball but undeniably sweet reverence for a well-made, and at times genuinely fascinating, movie. But like most things on the internet, there is a darker underbelly. The alt-right make up a significant proportion of Alita’s fanbase, and they are encouraged not to speak to “fake news” outlets about their love for the film. While others insist that a smear campaign funded by Disney to diminish its chances at award shows and earn middling reviews from critics has prevented the film from becoming the earth-shattering smash it should have been. And it’s a murky puddle of conspiracy and hysteria that hasn’t just made #AlitaArmy the most unexpected community of individuals on the internet, but representative of the internet as a whole.

Starring a motion-captured Rosa Salazar, with jarringly over-sized eyes that you get used to as time goes on, and a number of Oscar winners including Mahershala Ali, Christoph Waltz and Jennifer Connelly, Alita: Battle Angel is a zippy and gloriously hokey sci-fi spectacle far better than its tepid critical response earlier this year implied. About as frantic in its plotting as it is visually overwhelming, it is also a frustrating watch, ending on a tease for a sequel that likely won’t ever see the light of day, thanks to its rapid erasure from pop culture memory, and the fact that it has only made around $400m at the global box office. That its backers at 20th Century Fox have been absorbed by Disney in the months since its release likely doesn’t help… which is unfortunate considering the potential on offer and the slavish devotion it has inspired in so many fans.

That Alita: Battle Angel has sparked such devotion shouldn’t come as a major surprise. While adapted from a popular, if niche, manga by Yukito Kishiro, it exists for many as a relatively original property, unattached to pre-existing brands or its own “universe” of interconnected movies – an increasing anomaly in modern blockbuster filmmaking, and therefore deserving of at least some respect.

And while the film’s special effects are remarkable, full of whirring machines, inventive design work and technical ingenuity, it’s also appealingly old-fashioned in its storytelling. There’s none of the deadpan quirk or quippy verbalising of the Marvel Universe, and none of the modern studio-movie compulsion to eschew sincerity for a kind of snarky cynicism. There’s a colour and weight given to its world, too: the film’s central location of Iron City a diverse tapestry of junk yards, basketball courts and back-alleys.

Alita herself is also intriguingly joyous and heartwarming as a heroine. She gazes at the world with wonder, discovers herself, falls in love. She’s barely real, being both a cyborg and a motion-capture creation embodied on set by Salazar – but emotionally human all the same. With all of that in mind, it’s not hard to rationalise why the film has become quite as beloved as it has. What many within #AlitaArmy won’t do, however, is actually tell you why they love it so much.

Earlier this month a journalist from a US entertainment news site tweeted a request for #AlitaArmy members to share the reasoning behind their devotion, only to be set upon after an old tweet resurfaced in which she appeared to mock the fanbase. She was then made the subject of an attack video posted to YouTube in which Alita fans were encouraged not to speak to her, or the press itself. The video has since been deleted, after the journalist herself apologised on Twitter and asked for forgiveness. Her #AlitaArmy story has additionally never run.

If the tactics used in the response, from outlandish conspiracy claims, to YouTube antagonism, to the malicious targeting of a female journalist, feel familiar to anyone who has spent as little as five minutes exploring the modern alt-right, then you would be correct in spotting the crossover between the right-wing internet and elements of Alita fandom. For Alita: Battle Angel has been a battleground for society’s current culture wars for much of 2019, and just as jarringly nonsensical an arena as much of it deserves.

Upon its release in March, Alita was positioned as a right-wing alternative to Captain Marvel – the latter a lightning rod for aggrieved men’s rights activists, alt-right internet figures and misogynists to express their respective rages at the world. With its proudly feminist marketing, and star Brie Larson always eager to talk of the importance of representation in film and media, Captain Marvel was deigned “pandering SJW crap” by alt-right celebrity Jack Posobiec, leading him to popularise a previously under-the-radar alt-right campaign known as the #AlitaChallenge to rally support for Captain Marvel’s apparently apolitical, female-led rival.

Curiously, it is baffling to talk of Alita: Battle Angel as an apolitical movie. In truth, it’s arguably even far more liberal in its politics than many of the “SJW” movies the #AlitaArmy have waged war against – featuring none of the military fetishism of Captain Marvel, nor the performative, widely criticised “girl power” lip service in the likes of Avengers: Endgame or X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Set in a world of extreme inequality, Alita foregrounds its characters of colour, who are forced to live amid crime and corruption and taught to deify a wealthy, exploitative city in the sky built on the backs of lower-class workers. And like many existing in poverty in modern America, one of the few means of social ascendance in Alita: Battle Angel is via competitive sports.

Its politics aren’t subtle, but become even more blunt when articulated by its cast and crew. While Salazar earned little of the press attention devoted to Larson earlier this year, her repeated insistence in interviews that Alita marked a major step in Latinx representation in film weren’t very different from the kind of thing Larson was so aggressively pilloried for. “We’re here to stay, baby,” Salazar told Variety earlier this year. “Ain’t no wall going to keep us out... just being a Latinx actress at the helm of something like this in itself is a message. You know I carry my name with me wherever I go. I’m Rosa Bianca Salazar, and this is the next wave of Latino casting.”

As much as the #AlitaChallenge and its alt-right backers came to be mocked and memed themselves, many of the toxic ideas that underpinned the challenge have underpinned Alita fandom in the months since. “The human race has finally crafted the most likeable female protagonist,” proclaims a popular #AlitaArmy YouTube video, “one that doesn’t talk down to the fans, one that is believably powerful, one that is attractive without being overly sexualised”. The vlogger adds: “[She is] the perfect wife, the perfect daughter and the perfect friend.”

This collection of misogynist themes, related to female likeability, “believable” female strength and regressive views on how women should express their sexuality, have echoed around the internet for years but particularly after GamerGate. That 2014 movement, initially driven by misogynist attacks on video game journalists, quickly mutated into a means to attack women, leftists and most forms of human decency enacted both online and in public, reverberating as much through pop culture as it did politics. And they provide an exhausting soundtrack to almost every fantasy property in recent years to involve strong female characters – from the “Mary-Sue” debates that have surrounded Star Wars: The Last Jedi or Game of Thrones, ones questioning the apparent believability of female characters possessing certain amounts of physical strength or elaborately prophesied destinies, to the outrage over the “unlikeability” of Captain Marvel and by proxy Brie Larson herself. And they’ve sadly come to define an Alita fanbase that for the most part is celebratory rather than toxic.

And it’s doubly unfortunate because much of Alita fandom is largely positive. Numerous YouTube videos related to #AlitaArmy fandom are celebratory in tone, with fans congregating to raise awareness of a film that has touched them in ways few other blockbusters in recent memory have, and eager to spread the message. And there’s a scrappy, naively sweet charm to their efforts to get a sequel made. In this world, endlessly tweeting at verified film Twitter accounts and inspiring collective bafflement will actually make a real difference, instead of merely instigating mockery at the tweeters’ expense.

If Alita: Battle Angel does indeed exist as a one-and-done movie, its franchise dreams dashed with all the grace of the Tom Cruise-led monster-movie universe quietly scrapped after his reboot of The Mummy flopped, then it deserves to be memorialised as an odd triumph, with a go-for-broke weirdness and depth of sincerity that was always going to be too freaky for its own time. Not as a reflection of everything scary and destructive about geek culture and the internet today. Egomaniac he may be, but James Cameron deserves better.