The vampire-filled Titty Twister bar in From Dusk Till Dawn. The Grindhouse-inspired splatter-aesthetic of Planet Terror and Machete. Every single gorgeous frame of Sin City. Across his career, Robert Rodriguez has proved himself a visionary cinematic world-builder – and with Alita: Battle Angel he’s teaming up with the all-time master James Cameron, this time acting as producer and co-witer. This time Rodriguez is augmenting himself with cyberpunk trimmings, adapting a Japanese manga and anime series which depicts a future Earth where technology has risen and fallen again, leaving the planet littered with shards of a broken past. Rodriguez spoke to Empire about Alita’s world, as seen in the new trailer.
The basics
Alita: Battle Angel is set in the 26th century, 300 years after ‘The Fall’ – a technological fall which led to a war that sent civilisation back to a relative dark age. One high-tech city still floats in the sky, while the rest of society attempts to rebuild on Earth. “300 years before the movie opens it was much more technically advanced,” says Rodriguez. “It’s kind of like going into the past to see anything futuristic.”
Zalem
That giant metal structure in the sky is a man-made city called Zalem (“like the pronunciation of Jerusalem, ‘salem’”) – the last of the floating cities, which were destroyed during the war. “Zalem is still pretty preserved from 300 years before,” Rodriguez explains. “The inhabitants on Earth can’t get up there, they’ve never even seen what it looks like up there. 300 years ago they used to be able to take a space elevator right up to the centre of it. It’s been torn off during the war, which is why the bottom funnel is ripped – that’s how you went up and down between the two cities.”
It’s not the lack of a lift that stops people moving between Zalem and the city below – it’s the people of Zalem itself. “If you were ever to leave up there and go down, you can’t go back up,” says Rodriguez. “You have to be born up there, so it’s very elite in that way – no-one is allowed to ever go back up. You have to be somewhat perfect to be up there. They don’t want any contamination, because there was a lot of plagues and things that went on, and if anyone is sick they have to go back down. Down below you can switch out body parts and become a cyborg even, but to live up there you have to stay pure.”
The Scrapyard
Directly below Zalem is the centre of Iron City, which has since become a giant dumping ground for the floating city’s leftovers. “That used to be where the elevator was to take you up to Zalem, and now it just dumps its trash through that hole,” explains Rodriguez. “The whole of Iron City doesn’t look like that, just the centre, although the rest of the city is in pretty much disrepair.”
Rifling through the scraps is Christoph Waltz’s Dr. Ido, who kicks off the plot’s mystery when he finds Alita’s ‘core’ – her head and torso, with an intact human brain inside. “He usually scavenges through there to find any thrown-out bits of technology that will help him repair some of the factory workers,” Rodriguez says. “He has a clinic which he does for very little money just to help people out. It’s more of a factory-type town, and sometimes people need augmentation just to be able to do their job. Everything they make gets shipped up to Zalem. You have people who have augmentation just to do labour. And then you have some who are augmented, like the Ed Skrein character, who’s got a much more polished warrior body. Those are hunter-warriors, like bounty hunters who are hired to police. They’re not really given any police down there, they have to do it themselves.”
Iron City
Away from the junk piles lies the rest of Iron City – a bustling melting pot of a metropolis. While it has its dark patches, it’s no bleak urban nightmare. “We didn’t want it to be dystopian because it didn’t feel that way in the graphic novel,” Rodriguez reasons.
“You’re seeing the city through Alita’s eyes. Everyone else might think this place is a dump and dream about Zalem, but she sees the beauty in it and that’s why the audience is presented it in that way. And then she learns about the dangerous side – even in the trailer it begins very innocent and beautiful and she’s riding around on a bike, we’re seeing it through her perspective. Where Hugo is actually saying, ‘It’s a harsh world down here’ – because he knows the reality of it. And then we see that collide with her world, the danger of the city, and the threat of being who she is.”
The Hydro-Wall
At the edge of the city is a giant wall of water, skirting around giant supply tubes that travel up to Zalem. “If you were to go and put your hand over the Hydro-Wall, it would probably take your hand off,” warns Rodriguez. “That’s what keeps the city walled. Some of this technology that’s left – the Hydro-Wall, the Factory, and some of the Motorball games – is all technology from Zalem. They allow certain technology down there that they control.”
The Factory
One of the more menacing environments in the trailer is an ominous corridor flanked by spider-mech tanks called Centurions. “That’s the Factory, and that’s where you’d go if you were a bounty hunter turning in your kill for payment. That’s where you’d go if you have any business with Vector, who’s played by Mahershala Ali. He runs the Motorball games, and he runs the factories to deliver all the goods up to Zalem. That’s sort of his headquarters, which is why it’s more polished – it was built by Zalem to serve Zalem. It’s not something that the regular townsfolk can just go and hang out in. The Centurions regularly patrol the street to keep some kind of law and order.”
The Motorball Arena
If one word has Alita fans excited about a live-action adaptation, it’s Motorball – the deadly gladiatorial sport that entertains the people of Iron City and Zalem alike. It’s not been seen properly in either trailer yet – but the shot of Alita leaping through a brightly-coloured panel is the first glimpse of the Motorball Arena. “They’re funded and paid for by Zalem, because that’s how they get their entertainment up there, they have the people in the lower world do these gladiatorial games for them,” explains Rodriguez.
“Alita is crashing out of one of the monitors that’s filming the Motorball battle. That’s why it looks almost like a different world, because it’s more technological in a way. This is the big draw, this is like the Nascar for this town meets gladiatorial gaming. We’re still working on that, it’s a very exciting, big and layered sequence.”
The Badlands
In direct contrast to Iron City’s urban environments and bustling civilisation is the lush wilderness of the Badlands, where Alita and friends venture in search of answers. “This is where some of the artefacts of the war had crashed,” teases Rodriguez. “So they find a battleship out there. In the books and some of the stories there are renegades and rebels who go and live out there, but that’s not touched on in this film yet.”
The reason for that all that vibrant vegetation? The film takes place somewhere in what we’d currently call South America. “The way Yukito Kushiro wrote it, he didn’t write something that was particularly Asian-specific, it wasn’t set in Japan or Tokyo or anything,” Rodriguez explains. “Originally I think it was even set somewhere that would be like Kansas City. We moved it to South America because [James Cameron] realized that for a space elevator to work, scientifically it would have to be close to an equator. When you see the city and the colours and the textures it has a very South American feel to it, which is why it looks a little different from other science-fiction films. This green area is almost like a South American landscape, with waterfalls and pools of water. There’s no technology out here at all because it’s too far from the city. There’s no electricity out there. People have flocked from all over to the last walled city.”
Watch the new trailer for Alita: Battle Angel here. The film arrives in UK cinemas on 26 December.