I loved it all. I’m defenseless before any dizzyingly silly sci-fi epic that downloads gigabytes of lore into the viewer’s brain by means of a simple hero’s-journey narrative. Think of films like Jupiter Ascending, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, even last year’s Aquaman—colorful, mega-budgeted nonsense splashed onto a grand canvas. Alita: Battle Angel is based on Yukito Kishiro’s manga series Gunnm. Adapted by James Cameron (who also produced) and Laeta Kalogridis, the film is directed by Robert Rodriguez, whose previous efforts include bewildering CGI-boosted epics such as Spy Kids and Sin City. True to its origins, Alita is a living cartoon of a film, which only makes its ridiculousness easier to absorb.

The biggest ask the movie makes of its audience is to accept the unusual look of its leading lady, which no other character shares. Alita is performed via motion capture by Salazar (an up-and-coming star who made a significant impression in the Maze Runner series). When Alita falls from the sky, she’s just a head and torso ready to be plugged into a cyborg body. The kindly Doctor Dyson Ido (Waltz) obliges, and Alita wakes up, opening two eyes the size of dinner plates. It’s amazing that nobody sings “Jeepers Creepers” at any point, because these are some hefty peepers, computerized onto Salazar’s face to mimic the exaggerated style of manga and to set her apart from the regular old humans wandering around Iron City.

Still, if you can take the mental leap demanded by Alita’s distinctive appearance, then the rest of the film should follow. Alita doesn’t have one main story. It has a loose, episodic feel, illuminating different stages of its heroine’s past and eagerly setting up a potential sequel that will likely never come to pass (if box-office tracking is to be trusted). After receiving her robot body, Alita learns the rules of Iron City from Dr. Ido, then runs into the mysterious robotics expert Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), the Motorball crime lord Vector (Mahershala Ali), the bounty hunters Zapan (Ed Skrein) and Grewishka (Jackie Earle Haley), and the heartthrob street urchin Hugo (Keean Johnson). The film is a coming-of-age teen caper that evolves into a sports movie that evolves into a Bourne Identity–style action drama, as Alita unlocks the full range of her powers from her previous, forgotten life.

Most importantly, there’s action and lots of it—beautifully rendered, clean action, the likes of which only Cameron can provide. Though he’s only a producer and writer here, Cameron nearly drowns out Rodriguez’s directorial voice in the process of transposing the motion-capture technology he deployed so well in his last film (Avatar) onto this future-punk extravaganza. This is a world where people’s hands can turn into spinning chains or projectile spike-balls, and where Waltz’s character wields a 10-foot-tall hammer powered by a rocket engine. As in so many blockbusters of the moment, the set pieces have all the potential to be chaotic CGI messes. But Alita takes special care to have the choreography of its elaborate clashes make sense at every moment.