Welcome to the cyber world: The real-world tech behind Alita: Battle Angel

Enlarge / The futuristic cyborg world depicted in Alita: Battle Angel has some promising real-world analogues. (credit: 20th Century Fox)
The CGI-heavy cinematic world of Alita: Battle Angel, the big-screen adaptation of Yukito Kishiro's popular manga series Gunnm, is chock-full of the kinds of cyberpunk toys most of us only dream about. But while much of the technology in Alita is futuristic, it's deliberately grounded in the real-world technology of today, per producer James Cameron's vision for the film.
(Mildest of spoilers for Alita: Battle Angel below. You can read Sam Machkovech's largely spoiler-free review here.)
Set some 600 years in the future, the cyberpunk world of Alita: Battle Angel is a dystopian society where people in Iron City scavenge for anything useful—especially technology—in the Scrapyard, which holds everything dumped from the floating city of Zalem, where the 'elite' reside. There's a series of tubes where products are sent from the Iron City to Zalem (in exchange for the latter's refuse), but otherwise the two worlds never really mix. The Scrapyard is where a kind doctor finds cyborg Alita's head, holding her carefully preserved human brain. He knows immediately he's looking at highly advanced technology from three centuries earlier, lost in time, and rehabilitates her. The plot follows her journey from amnesiac innocent to fierce warrior.
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