Alita: Battle Angel

***Mild Spoiler Warning***

James Cameron (producer) and Robert Rodriguez (director) have delivered an aesthetically stunning adaptation of the manga series, Gunnm, but at the expense of developing significant narrative tension and critical engagement with challenging ideas. Its failure to grapple with questions arising for human essentialism once the genie of genetic and cybernetic enhancement is let out of the bottle leads it to endorse certain popular notions about human development through its silence. It essentially showcases a naïve transhumanism that assumes conceptions of gender, humanity and morality would remain stable after 200 years of technological development from our time to the time of Alita’s birth and training, and then another 300 years while Alita drops out of history and increased human use of cybernetic technology becomes usual to survive a relative dark age following catastrophic war.

It is probably to be expected that a popular sci-fi film will simply reflect the values and tastes of its time, rather than offering any thoughtful critique of such naïve ideas, but there is naïve and then there is naïve. For example, in a scene in which Alita’s body and upper torso are being transferred to another body made from long-lost, more advanced technology, voice-over narration tells the viewer that the body interfaces with Alita’s sub-conscious mind to realise her tacit body image. Of course, the resulting hypersexualised form combined with the infantile stature and facial features of the character produce the ideal object of the normalising, heterosexual male gaze in the early twenty-first century.

Obviously, this raises issues of gender relations considering the pressure such an ideal type places on women to appear impossibly young and machine-like in order to feel acceptable under public scrutiny. However, more generally, it reinforces assumptions about the stability of socially constructed standards of normativity over time, particularly once technological advancements allow for a transcendence of existing physical limitations on the human body and psychology. It is concerning that attitudes to our potential transhuman future are developing amongst the rising generations without responsibility being taken to warn them of the current understanding that the boundaries of human nature are vague and porous, making it unlikely that current values and normative concepts will endure as our power over our physical form, and that of our progeny, continues to increase.

More concerning than the naïve assumption that our stereotypes of gender will endure through technological change is the similar thought that our ideas and values of innocence, justice and justification will endure. It is primarily due to Alita’s appearance of innocence and her characterisation as the protagonist that we view her conduct as being morally justified rather than dangerously reckless. However, even if more care were taken to establish the conventionality of her moral compass, according to early twentieth-century, Western, liberal-democratic standards, there is no guarantee that, after over 500 years, there would be anyone around who shares our moral intuitions to the effect that Nova’s oppressive conduct is clearly villainous.

The danger of naïve transhumanism is its persisting belief in an essence of humanity that acts as the truthmaker for moral claims, i.e. human flourishing defines the Good and the way humans flourish does not change – even as it champions a level of development to the human anatomy, psychology and environment that flat-out guarantees nothing like an essential humanity could remain constant over a large enough time scale. This leads to complacency about the need to locate a moral truthmaker somewhere other than in human nature, which leads to neglect of the moral in the long term if there is anything objective about morality. Now, many will say that there is nothing objective about morality. However, if that is the case, then this, too, is a message that is not getting across to the masses through naïve representations of transhumanism. After all, Alita is clearly portrayed as a representation of enduring and noble values that are privileged above the selfishly pragmatic values of those whom she righteously defeats.

The ending of the film quite obviously sets up a sequel in which Alita will confront the villainous Nova, yet Alita’s motivation for attacking him and the floating city he rules goes beyond the suffering that he has caused to many. During the war 300 years before, Alita was part of an attack force sent by an opposing government (the United Republic of Mars or URM) to destroy the city. We do not yet know whether the desire to kill Nova is influenced by prior indoctrination and/or programming, nor whether the motives of URM were beyond reproach. It could turn out, in a future sequel, that she has subconscious motives of which we would not approve. However, what would that matter? If we imagine that this is a time at which anyone who would object is long dead, and our indignation at moral wrongs in such a distant future can make no difference, then our outrage is pointlessly anachronistic. And yet, it continues to seem apropos to make such moral judgements. Maybe morality is something that endures somehow, after all. If it does, it is for sure that it cannot persist in virtue of an enduring human nature.