2011Director: Jonathan Liebesman
Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, and Bridget Moynahan
Plot: A Marine Staff Sergeant who has just had his retirement approved goes back into the line of duty in order to assist a 2nd Lieutenant and his platoon as they fight to reclaim the city of Los Angeles from alien invaders.
Is Battle: Los Angeles a great new alien invasion movie, despite the horrible reviews its received? Is it watchable and fun despite lacking many qualities of fine cinema? Does it at least partially make up for the tragedy that was Skyline? NO! NO! NO! Battle: Los Angeles is none of these things and worse. I would watch Skyline five times in one day before I would endure this irritating snoozefest again, and just to be clear Skyline was the worst alien invasion movie I'd ever seen... until I saw Battle: Los Angeles.
Like most really really bad movies, its hard to know where to begin with the critique of Battle: Los Angeles. We could talk about the unpleasant hand held style incongruous and out of place with the big budget special affects driven imagery. This was especially irritating for me, because I assumed from trailers this movie might be mixing some traditional camera work with home video Cloverfield-type shots, but instead we got this weird jerky high-power camera work throughout with no interesting mix of point-of-views. We could talk about how bad the aliens are. I don't think they are as bad as everyone else, but they certainly weren't scary or in any way impressive in terms of creature creation. I could also note that 95% of the dialogue is complete throw-away. It occurred to me in the theater that this movie was a kind of antithesis to Quentin Taratino's Reservoir Dogs, where conversations, instead of action or visuals, literally are the entire movie. Battle: Los Angeles may as well be a silent film for all the insight the dialogue provides us, in fact, I'm fairly confident it would be more enjoyable that way. Maybe all of these previous criticisms could be overlooked if the movie had an interesting storyline to explore in this admittedly already overdone alien invasion genre. The movie follows a unit of Marines and it seemed at first that this military angle could have offered a different perspective from the more classic family with kids trying to evade aliens, but (surprise!) this opportunity was totally missed. We have family drama and standard alien evasion, just the order is jumbled from previous formulas. There's a long sequence on a bus that I imagine at one point in the filmmaker's minds was to be the meat and excitement of the middle of the film, instead nothing really happens. Some aliens get blown up, some military men get blown up, then we move along. Later the military group finds the master control alien ship, do they go in it? Do we get to see some interesting alien going-ons? No, we paint it with a laser a la Pauly Shore's In the Army Now and wait outside. And jesus, can we have a uniformed woman in ANY movie that is not Michelle Rodriguez!? I don't have anything against her but seeing her in this role is about as interesting as watching paint dry. There's a backstory with Aaron Eckhart's character regarding how he lost a lot of men while leading his last military mission. That might not sound like a very interesting backstory to occupy, oh, around 30 minutes of a 2 hour movie to you and me, but the makers of Battle: Los Angeles are gonna have to disagree with us there. Trust them, it will be emotional when Aaron Eckhart reveals how beat up he is about losing men, and how he's really a great guy and worthy of leading the men he's already been leading for the last 90 minutes. This lenghty emotional speech is so irrelevant he literally ends it by saying "None of this matters right now..." If only something had mattered, at some point.
Sidenote: Possibly one of the most unintentionally funny lines to look out for "Maybe I can help. I'm a veterinarian."
