WARNING: Spoilers for Alita: Battle Angel ahead.

Alita: Battle Angel doesn’t have a proper ending. Sure, the movie fades to black and the credits play, yet there’s no real resolution to the primary goal of its main character, with a lot more conflict teased in a sequel that nobody is expecting to ever get made.

Straight up, Alita: Battle Angel is a good movie, surprisingly so given the low quality of its trailers and emerging narrative as a box office flop. Alita herself is a wonder, with Rosa Salazar’s mo-cap performance showcasing a careful evolution of naivety (the anime eyes totally work in context too), and the world she inhabits, while overwhelming, is so confidently presented audiences can just go with it. In IMAX 3D, it’s a near unparalleled experience, the best-justified use of the tech since 2013’s Gravity and most astounding ground-up CGI landscape since Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar. There are many creaks, mainly in the dialogue and Robert Rodriguez’s subsequent direction of actors (Keean Johnson as love interest Hugo is particularly wooden early on), but that’s easy to get past thanks to the sheer scale of the film and its story.

Said story is about Alita’s discovery of her past as she navigates a world of Hunter-Warriors, Motorball and first love. It starts off very well-balanced, but as the movie zips through its 122-minute runtime, something increasingly feels off; just as Alita: Battle Angel begins building to a major showdown, many of its story threads are being tied up, leading to an abrupt, unearned ending.

  • This Page: Alita: Battle Angel Is Missing Its Third Act Page 2: Why Alita: Battle Angel Doesn’t Have An Ending

What Happens In Alita’s Ending? The Film Just Stops

Alita: Battle Angel’s ending sees a lot of the core plots converge. When Hugo is mortally wounded by Zapan (Ed Skrein), she saves him with the help of Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), allowing Ido (Christoph Waltz) to put Hugo’s decapitated head in a new body. Alita then confronts (and kills) both Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley) and Vector (Mahershala Ali) for the latter’s role in corrupting her boyfriend. Hugo struggles to adapt to his new life and decides to climb up the factory tube to Zalem, but is hit by a defense ring and sent falling to his death despite Alita’s best efforts.

Through all this has been an emerging threat in the form of Nova, a scientist based in Zalem who’s been puppeteering Vector (sometimes literally) and attempting to have Alita killed, sending Grewishka and in turn Zapan after her. Essentially, most of the trials Alita faces in the movie are on his orders; he even sends the defense ring that hits Hugo. Clearly, Nova is the big threat that must be overcome.

Except that’s not how the story goes. Following Hugo’s death, the movie jumps forward to Alita now a Motorball superstar, well on her way to becoming a champion and being able to travel up to Zalem to confront Nova. After shedding a tear for Hugo, she walks out in front of a packed stadium and holds her sword high, signaling a challenge to Nova (revealed to be Edward Norton). Then… the credits roll.

Alita: Battle Angel Is Not A Complete Story

Plainly, Alita: Battle Angel is missing its third act; the payoff to everything that’s come before where she actually gets to confront her ultimate obstacle. From very early on, Nova was established as that threat (to the audience at least), and thus the logical endpoint to the story. In that light, the ending of the movie as released is only the culmination of a second act, seeing the plot pivot into a clear confrontation - Alita states her intent to kill Nova - yet not actually providing any climax.

The result is that Alita has an incomplete arc in Battle Angel. We see her enter this new world wide-eyed (literally and figuratively) wanting to care for those immediately around her, which sees her begin embracing her Berserker past; at first, the core conflict is becoming a Hunter-Warrior, then it shifts to be about her romance with Hugo and their mission to get to Zalem. But the root of the conflict always lies with Nova, and so Alita’s ability to control her destiny is tied into him; having her big final showdown with a lackey where she only just discovers Nova’s existence is no substitute. There is something to be said about the victory for Alita’s coming-of-age story, becoming an independent figure able to hold her sword up to evil, but that’s all promise and no action.

Imagine Star Wars ending with the Millennium Falcon’s arrival on Yavin IV, at the end of the second act; this can be argued narratively as the resolution of Luke’s core mission - save Princess Leia and get the Death Star plans to the Rebellion - but there’s still an overbearing threat to be challenged. Alita: Battle Angel pulls pretty much that exact trick, leaving audiences with a moon-sized hole. In contrast, while The Empire Strikes Back ends leaving Han’s life and the truth of Luke’s parentage in the balance, there’s still a sense of completion to the story as established.

Page 2 of 2: Why Alita: Battle Angel Doesn’t Have An Ending

Alita’s Anime Ends In The Same Way - But It’s A Different Story

The roots of Alita: Battle Angel’s ending and its problems seem to be rooted in the two-episode 1993 anime based on the first two volumes of the manga. For certain, James Cameron’s affection for Alita clearly comes from the OVA as much as the source book, evidenced by how his story maintains many of the anime’s changes. Now, that anime focus is true of many manga adaptations (Ghost in the Shell 2017 is likewise rooted in the movies and TV series as much the comic), but with a secondary source, adjustments mean micro details can be overlooked.

Read More: Alita: Battle Angel Movie Differences - Every Change From The Anime

In Alita: Battle Angel’s case, the movie provides a lot more context to the world that’s absent in the anime: Alita’s mysterious past, Motorball and the possibility of winning a pass to Zalem, and (most importantly) Nova himself aren’t in the anime as they weren’t introduced in the Battle Angel manga until later volumes. All of this means the scope of the anime’s story is tighter; Alita is just a wide-eyed girl falling in love with Hugo, whose obsession with Zalem comes entirely from him. As a knock-on effect, Vector is framed as a much larger villainous presence in the anime whose defeat provides closure, while Hugo’s death is an end to Alita’s main relationship and, thus, her arc.

The expansions made in Alita: Battle Angel are mostly for the better; learning just a little about Alita’s past - Panzer Kunst and her time on Mars - is a lot more intriguing than a blank slate, while Motorball gifts the movie some of its most dizzying spectacle. However, Nova presents a problem. Having a larger threat than Vector makes sense for a blockbuster movie, but doing so shifts Alita’s story away from Hugo - most of her conflict comes from sources beyond him - meaning his death serves as a plot motivator rather than a proper resolution. In its place, we have a mysterious shadow who is only actually seen in the final moments.

For all the faithfulness to the plot, Alita: Battle Angel has a different story. And thanks to the scale expansion, the same narrative resolution doesn’t round out the character arc anymore.

Alita Really Wants A Sequel (But Won’t Get One)

Of course, the discussion so far treats Alita: Battle Angel as if it’s a standalone movie, which is most certainly isn’t supposed to be. It’s intended as the start of a new franchise, and so is littered with material that sets up future manga stories; much of what we’ve discussed as being added to the anime’s story - Alita’s past, Motorball, Nova - are aspects that become more pronounced in later volumes, as is the expanded role of Zapan and brief cameo from Jai Courtney as Jashugan: all of this is sequel fodder.

Read More: Will Alita: Battle Angel Get A Sequel? Here’s What The Story Would Be

For the most part, this isn’t at the detriment of Alita. One of the biggest mistakes a potential franchise-starter can do is be so obsessed with groundwork that it forgets to tell a compelling, singular story: the likes of Star Wars and Iron Man may have spawned sprawling universes, but that only happened because the first entries were fundamentally good, standalone adventures. Alita sidesteps this trap a lot, having the overt teases quick and subtle - many likely missed that Courtney was even in the film - and working the bigger aspects into the existing plot - Motorball replaces the anime’s Hunter-Warrior sequence.

And yet that’s all undone by an ending that swerves from the conclusion to leave the story wide open to the point it needs another film. It’s a cheap trick, one that rarely works for the first movie in a burgeoning franchise.

Once again, there’s a misconstruing of the Battle Angel anime and its real purpose. It wasn’t, like Ghost in the Shell or other classics of the era, a full-on feature but rather two 20-minute shorts that were never intended to go to series; essentially a marketing tool for the manga, meaning lower production values and a lot of the source material being cut. Being rooted in the manga doesn’t disqualify it from worth, but it doesn’t make it a foolproof roadmap for a Hollywood film almost 30 years later either.

What makes this sting most is that a sequel doesn’t seem overly likely at this point. Alita: Battle Angel is tracking to for a terrible domestic opening and, barring a major reprieve from China, is sure become 2019’s first major bomb. Any overt sequel teasing was for naught, and may have actually hurt chances of an Alita 2; while much of the failure can fall on the movie’s marketing and the fact a movie based on a niche, decades-old Japanese property gained a $200 million budget, a stronger ending would have certainly helped the critical attention, in turn perhaps given the film a boost.

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Alita: Battle Angel’s ending is informed not by the story, but the choices made for an intentionally short-lived anime and overconfidence in getting a sequel. What could have been a future cult classic is instead only half a movie.

Next: Alita: Battle Angel Review

  • Battle Angel Alita Release Date: 2019-02-14