The year is 2563. According to the introductory text, the world was essentially destroyed in an all-encompassing battle three hundred years prior, nicknamed “The Fall.” Two cities remain: Zolum, the sky city where the rich and powerful live, and Iron City, where the normals trudge by, hoping to pick up a scrap of fallen sky garbage that might make their luck. That’s exactly what happens to Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), who finds an unconscious but intact teenage girl cyborg head in the junkyard, and brings her back to his ersatz clinic to fix (in this world, where humans often have robotic limbs, doctors are also electrical engineers). When she wakes, the cyborg girl has no memories of her past, so Ido gives her a future. Her name will be Alita, and she can act as a substitute daughter for the one he so violently lost many years ago.