Alita: Battle Angel

A common trend among many forms of media is the tale of an apocalyptic world in which the grand advancements of technology have take over the humanity of mankind and the line between man and machine becomes even hazier than we had anticipated.
And aside from the infamous series Black Mirror, the other film that I would say depicts this extremely well is the recently released Alita: Battle Angel

Directed by Robert Rodriguez and produced by James Cameron, Alita has been on my to watch list since they released the trailer for it in 2018. What I had built up in my mind was the story-line of Salt swirled together with the CGI animation of Avatar. And while there were a few scenes I could fast-forward though, the overall feel of the film was unlike anything I had ever previously seen.

This is perhaps one of the only films in which I was very mesmerized by the background characters in the film. The fabulous rendering made the half cybernetic and half human characters to seem perfectly normal in their world. Doing normal activities with machines for hands and and feet, one could almost believe that the world created by Rodriguez and Cameron were one of complete plausibility.
A dream for the disabled person.

But animation aside, an interesting mark of the story was one wherein a place is depicted as being the ultimate goal in life, where only the best type of people get to live. Now up until the end of the film, we hear very little about Zalem, the prized location where anything and everything seems possible. We know that people can be thrown out of Zalem, and that in order to gain eligibility into the flying island, that one must win a tournament of Motorball, which really seems like the equivalent of if you played handball with skates on.
But aside from that, we learn very little about this place that people want so desperately to be a part of. And although we do not currently have any such location on earth, we today can also say that certain items and luxuries can only ever be consumed by the elite and tend to leave the masses crowded, hungry, and yearning for greener pastures.

One such example can be found in the health care systems globally. I used to think that the cost of health care in my country was a cost that was too high for the average person, that was until I had watched the Patriot Act by Hasan Minhaj on how the cost of basic medicine in the United States had increased by 500% and had left many citizens trying to obtain their medication via the black market and even resorting to rationing their dosage in order to make ends meet, a decision that has resulted in many losing their lives.
Now we all know that there are certain countries that provide health care at zero cost, and while that maybe not completely true; taxes must be involved somehow, the idea that something that was created to save your life would be too expensive and that you would have to choose between living on the streets and LIVING, is the ultimate Sophie's choice.

But I digress.

The point that I and the creators of Alita: Battle Angel are trying to bring about is the idea that technology in and of itself is not bad. What does tend toward evil is the people that misuse said tech for their own gain. And so the strong prey on the weak and the rich just keep getting richer.

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