Watched this the other night at a friend's house.
I kinda liked it when it first came out, but goddamn, I never realized how much it fucking sucks.
The characters are like cardboard cut-outs from one of those fold-out castles that little girls play with. You've got a paralyzed marine; you know from the beginning that he's going to love running around and flying on dragons and shit. And of course he's going to fall in love with the native princess, and she's going to fall in love with him, even though she's betrothed to the most badass hunter in the tribe, and he's a member of the invading race using an artificial body to try and manipulate her people. And somehow the fact that he becomes an inanimate object every time he goes to sleep doesn't seem to bother anybody there.
The flight scenes were pretty cool, I guess, and so was the scene where the humans demolish the giant tree, but after that you get a literal Trail of Tears that's about as subtle as Bebpo's moves when he wants to kiss a girl, and the rest of the second act and the beginning of the third drag more than Himuro's dick. You finally get to the climactic battle, and it's decent enough, but the whole thing is resolved by the biggest deus-ex-machina I've ever seen in a film. It's so unsatisfying. It's like the battle didn't matter at all; they could have just chilled out and waited for the planet to wipe out the human forces, and a lot more of their people would have lived to laugh at the humans as they limped back to their ship.
You could probably recreate the entire film using clips from Pocahontas, Ferngully, and Dances with Wolves. We've seen this exact story before, and we've seen much better tellings of that story. It's like Cameron just stuck a bunch of tropes in a blender and filmed the result with some really high-tech cameras.
Battle Angel had better be some epic shit to erase the bad taste of this one.
