'Alita: Battle Angel' Clip: Alita Wrecks The Competition In Motorball

In the futuristic science fiction world of Alita: Battle Angel, the population needs entertainment – and they find it in the form of Motorball, a brutal sport in which cyborgs race around a ring chasing after a ball while destroying each other to get it. 20th Century Fox has released a new clip of a few highlights of director Robert Rodriguez's action sequence, which features the amnesiac cyborg Alita (Rosa Salazar) absolutely obliterating her competition in front of an electrified audience. Check it out below.

This clip comes from 20th Century Fox's Italian YouTube channel and is all in Italian, but since the whole thing revolves around a single action set piece, it's easy to grasp even if you don't speak the language.

I can see why sci-fi lovers would dig this: while the human faces on the cyborg bodies still look a little rough, the rest of the visuals are solid. It's very familiar – the whole thing looks like a something out of 1975's Rollerball, if Rollerball had a massive budget and was full of CG-enhanced characters – but we'll have to see if Rodriguez and producer James Cameron can imbue this scene with any meaning by making us care about the characters at this point in the story. It's easy to pick something apart out of context, but considering the strong early buzz for the film, maybe there's more than meets the eye here.

Here's the film's official synopsis:

From visionary filmmakers James Cameron (AVATAR) and Robert Rodriguez (SIN CITY), comes ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL, an epic adventure of hope and empowerment. When Alita (Rosa Salazar) awakens with no memory of who she is in a future world she does not recognize, she is taken in by Ido (Christoph Waltz), a compassionate doctor who realizes that somewhere in this abandoned cyborg shell is the heart and soul of a young woman with an extraordinary past. As Alita learns to navigate her new life and the treacherous streets of Iron City, Ido tries to shield her from her mysterious history while her street-smart new friend Hugo (Keean Johnson) offers instead to help trigger her memories. But it is only when the deadly and corrupt forces that run the city come after Alita that she discovers a clue to her past – she has unique fighting abilities that those in power will stop at nothing to control. If she can stay out of their grasp, she could be the key to saving her friends, her family and the world she's grown to love.

Alita: Battle Angel finally arrives in theaters on February 14, 2019.