Alita: Battle Angel's Backstory Explained

Before we get to the secrets of Alita's past, it's important to review the key moments of the film.

The world of the 2563 envisioned in the story is very different from the one we know. Even as people in the streets strive to make better lives for themselves, it's clear that Earth has been scarred deeply. Nature is doing its best to heal in the post-apocalyptic ruins outside Iron City.

Wherever it cannot, technology fills in the gaps. The citizenry is a patchwork, from flesh and blood beings with a variety of cyber prosthetics to full-body replacement tech. The undercurrent of this society is filled with criminals who steal these cyber parts. Sometimes their victims live, but more often they don't.

Class divisions are a way of life. Iron City is caught in the shadow of Zalem, a floating city held in place by cable tethers and anchors. The wealthy reside in Zalem, far from the junkyards, and among them is a puppet master silently pulling strings.

On a day trip outside the city, Alita and her new friends come to a body of water surrounded by flora, evidence of the natural world reclaiming the land after the Fall. Significantly, there is a crashed ship in the middle of the lake, part of the United Republics of Mars (URM), the combatants whose attack brought about the Fall on Earth.

She leaves the others behind to explore the wreckage. Inside the derelict ship, the long-abandoned onboard mechanisms respond to her, and she to it, with little surprise. With a few instinctive finger swipes, a door opens to reveal a "berserker" body, a frame once used by the shock troops of the URM. She takes the body core with her and tries to convince Dr. Ido to implant her in it, but he refuses. In an act of rebellion, Alita registers herself as a hunter-warrior.

Later in the film, Alita is again set upon by the previous attacker who survived — only he's been upgraded, and this time he nearly destroys her.

Dr. Ido relents in performing the berserker transplant as her body has been critically damaged. The nanotechnology in the shell conforms to her will. A major piece of the puzzle of her history is revealed: she was part of the attack forces of the URM. Ido, her father figure, assures her that even though the body was that of "the enemy... That's just a shell. It's not bad or good. That part's up to you."

The final push in the war was a bioweapon that evaded Earth's defenses and was unleashed. The disease spread globally, killing millions and quickly overtaking the meager virus-mitigation options they had. The citizens of the floating city of Zalem sealed themselves in and survived as the rest of the world crumbled. In time, Zalem would become the single hub of true power in the world.

As the audience learns from Alita's flashbacks, a URM cyborg army invaded Earth and attacked Zalem, but they were not successful. 99 was a part of the army that, at the end of this incursion, would be relegated to the scrapyard of Iron City. Earth launched a counterstrike against Mars that was equally devastating, sending nanobots to wipe out the former colony.

Not everyone died, neither on Earth nor on Mars. Surviving refugees converged in Iron City, the area just beneath Zalem, as the rest of Earth was rendered inhospitable to survivors. In time, the world would recover as nature crept back into regions of Earth untrammeled by humans.

Through stringently enforced rules, peace took hold among the survivors. Life on the ground was hard, and the governing laws cruel but nonetheless effective. Iron City's scrapyard housed the remnants of the great war. Among the scrap was left the core of Alita... to be found one day by Dr. Ido, beginning the narrative of the franchise.

There are several allusions that can be inferred from the Fall, the primary one being the "War in Heaven" from the Book of Revelations:

Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth and his angels with him. — Revelation 12:7–10

We learn that Dr. Ido and his ex-wife Dr. Chiren (played in the film by Jennifer Connelly) once lived in Zalem, but were apparently "cast down" into Iron City. While the cyborg Alita would not earn her status as "Battle Angel" until later, her former life as 99 — and her fate as a fallen avenging angel during the attack on Zalem — dovetail into this notion of Zalem being heaven and Iron City being a hell into which the wretched and rejected are condemned. The conceit of this parallel opens up intriguing ideas. The audience is primed to take sides, with Zalem the shining, aspirational destination and Iron City a punishment.

Yet we see that great and terrible things flow from Zalem, and as hard a life as Iron City provides, the people there are not all bad. It's just as Dr. Ido says to Alita after she is implanted into the berserker body, "It's not bad or good. That part's up to you." The movie doesn't dig into this aspect of Alita's life as 99, but the preexisting material suggests she came to Earth to attack it. By definition, it means she was there to kill humans and through a very narrow lens could be seen as "the enemy."

The overarching theme of Alita: Battle Angel is free will. Individuals have freedom of choice and there's always a chance for redemption, even if it involves "sins of the past" the individual doesn't even remember.

The original manga Gunnm features many similarities to the final U.S. version of Alita, but also has striking differences. Chief among them: the lead character is named Gally, not Alita. Before launching in Business Jump, Gally appeared as a cyborg police officer in an unpublished manga. While the police officer angle was abandoned, the character and the environs of Iron City stuck with writer/artist Kishiro, ultimately becoming the dismembered, amnesiac avenging angel we know and love.

Another difference is Alita's eyes, which are properly proportioned in comparison with other characters in Kishiro's manga, but noticeably larger in the film. Given manga and anime's predilection for wide-eyed characters, the decision, championed by director Robert Rodriguez, was made that Alita should have large anime eyes. An early teaser trailer was cut early in the filmmaking process, partially for marketing the film in advance, but also to gain approval from Cameron and production partner Jon Landau. Cameron commented that "the eyes needed to be fixed," but not by making them smaller. Instead, he instructed Rodriguez to make the irises bigger and more realistic.

Unfortunately, it didn't work for everyone. Film critics from National Public Radio, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe, among others, asserted the look was too "uncanny valley" for them, referring to a psychological barrier where a person sees what appears to be another person or living entity but is instead a close duplication. The very slight dissonance being recognized by the brain conflicts with what looks perfectly normal to the eye, creating a cognitive break that causes participants to be "thrown out" of suspension of disbelief.

It took a long time for Alita to come to the screen. 20th Century Fox optioned the property in 1999, but principal photography didn't begin until 2016.

The film finally debuted in the United States in February of 2019, roughly 20 years after being optioned, and while its worldwide gross was over $404 million, it was deemed a disappointment. Its reported break-even point, factoring in the costs of marketing and distribution above production, was presumed to be somewhere around $350–$500 million.

Another knock against the film was its competition. Because of blockbusters from Disney and its subsidiaries Marvel Entertainment, Pixar, and Lucasfilm reaping returns north of a billion dollars, Alita: Battle Angel's final tallies appeared that much more unspectacular in comparison. Little more than a month after the movie's theatrical debut, Disney acquired the Fox entertainment division for $71.3 billion, further casting a shadow over Alita.

However, audience recognition and interest in the property have increased, and there's still plenty of material ripe for adaptation. In another strangely ironic twist, the film might benefit from 2020's global COVID-19 pandemic — after mass closures of theaters and film productions shutting down worldwide, the theaters that managed to reopen later in the year often needed to get creative about the films they screened.

Thanks in part to the fan movement Alita Army, the movie returned to the cinemas on October 30, 2020. Fears of large audiences contracting the virus at the cineplex may yet stifle Alita's resurrection, but a strong response could reignite hopes for the franchise.