Same Haircut, Different Century

The manga Battle Angel Alita has occupied a specific corner of science fiction for thirty years—a cyborg girl with no memory found in pieces in a junkyard future, rebuilt by a doctor who loves her, slowly discovering she has capabilities that the world has practical reasons to fear. It’s the kind of premise that sounds simple and keeps revealing new weight, which is probably why James Cameron spent two decades developing the screenplay before finally handing directing duties to Robert Rodriguez.

Alita: Battle Angel is set in Iron City, the world that exists in the shadow of a floating city called Zalem—stratification made literal, class as altitude. Alita, played by Rosa Salazar, is found and reconstructed by Ido (Christoph Waltz), a compassionate doctor who would prefer she not remember who she was. Her new friend Hugo would prefer the opposite. The story turns on what happens when the powers running that system realize what exactly they’ve allowed to walk around free. It’s fundamentally a film about the violence required to keep someone small, and what happens when that fails.

Dua Lipa recorded Swan Song as the film’s title track. She mentioned identifying with Alita—the temperament, she said, and also the haircut, which is the kind of detail that makes a press quote worth anything. The song fits the film’s emotional register: something resolving, a conviction forming under pressure. Dua Lipa at that point in her career was one of the few people who could make that kind of purpose-built pop feel like something other than product placement for an emotion—and Swan Song earns its place in the film without needing the film to prop it up.