I recently went to watch a weird new video game that didn’t allow the player to actually play. No controllers, no headset, just a screen. It was called Battle: Los Angeles.
Of course I jest, it isn’t really a video game, though the action found in it is more like a video game than Call of Duty is. Instead it is the latest alien invasion movie to hit the big screen. I went into this movie pretty pumped, I thought it looked action packed and I was looking forward to seeing what they were going to do that other movies sharing their tent hadn’t already done.
Unfortunately the answer to this question is this: very little.
The basic principle to this movie is as follows: Step one: everyone larks about on Earth enjoying life, preparing weddings, kissing pregnant wives’ bumps, the usual crap people get up to when they’re enjoying life. Step two: aliens attack, blow up many things, kill many people, threaten world domination. Step three: humans fight back with their guns.
Yeah, it’s nothing new, just another alien movie. For me, it felt a bit like Independence Day mixed in with a bit of War of the Worlds. The story centres around Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz who is about to retire from service and enjoy the rest of his life I’d imagine, but it isn’t to be as random aliens disguised as meteorites plummet to Earth and start shootin’.
Nantz gets called upon to join a regiment of marines who are being led by a bloke called Martinez who’s only just got out of the academy and is now leading his marines into war against an intergalactic enemy.
Notice that I called them marines. That’s what they are supposed to be. Marines: a group of excellent soldiers who are a lot more specialist than you regular army men. So could someone please explain to me why these marines are about as capable at their job as Charlie Sheen would be as a brain surgeon.
Seriously some of the ‘marines’ are so poor. One of them, nicknamed ‘the virgin’, shouldn’t be allowed to play Halo let alone be in the military. The movie even emphasises his inability to be a marine, as if it saw its own flaws and thought drawing a big red circle around it would maybe make it funny. For example one scene at the start has him struggling to hold his drink resulting in him vomiting. Another has him shooting his automatic weapon into thin air, y’know like all marines are trained to do.
Okay, so it’s not every day aliens come to Earth and start tearing up everyone and everything in their path, but please, these marines should actually act like marines! Even the leader, Martinez, is plain awful, crumbling under pressure, not knowing how things work in the military. If only he’d listened in leadership school instead of drawing pictures of kittens the whole time.
So it’s left to Nantz to be the only decent marine in this, there are some scenes where he quite literally takes on the enemy by himself whilst his platoon just watch in awe. He’s played by Aaron Eckhart, the best actor in this movie by a long long way. The others just don’t quite compare to him.
I saw Eckhart during an interview with Jon Stewart a while back and I remember him saying he worked really hard on being an authentic marine. I have to say I think he succeeded, if only his co-actors were as dedicated as him! Seriously they just sucked, none of them looked like they should have been marines. Ne-Yo was in it for crying out loud! He survived and his friend didn’t, which annoyed me. A lot of the better characters die in this movie. To be fair to them though they got casted into these roles, and by the looks of it they were supposed to be inept. So maybe it’s bad casting/direction rather than bad acting.
Another issue is the action sequences, that are actually good, but because there are so many marines at one point, you don’t have a clue who is getting killed. You figure out who’s died by looking at who’s missing in the next scene! Sometimes you have no idea if a marine has died, a randomer, or whether it’s just a dead body that’s been flung across the set in an explosion.
Actually that is one thing this movie does that it’s other brothers don’t usually do. Show dead bodies. How many movies like this have we seen where there’s been a massive alien invasion, millions have perished, and yet, no dead bodies to be seen anywhere. It’s always as if the invaders are massive OCD clean freaks and tidy up after themselves as they continue in their massacres. So yes, well done Battle: LA for not shying away from the obvious like so many movies do.
Another thing I did like about Battle: LA was the young kid, Hector, who’s just a civilian picked up with his dad as the marines move forward. He has pretty much no lines at all and yet he’s one of the better characters. I think that too speaks volumes. All the other characters are just the same ones you find in all these movies, the ones with something at home to look forward to, perhaps a baby on the way, or a wedding, you get the idea. Michelle Rodriguez is also in it, I do like her, but she’s in serious danger of typecasting herself nowadays.
So what about the aliens themselves? Well they were about as generic as you’ll get. They kind of looked like Alpha, the little camp robot from the Power Rangers series. Not really that intimidating but they did have armour that was quite resistant to our bullets. Didn’t stop them shooting at them though.
Their reason for invasion is to use our water apparently. At least they have a purpose. But they lack any real character about them. They’re all just carbon copies of each other with the occasional larger one who represents the leader. There’s one scene where one of them grabs onto another and saves him from being killed. That shows they’re just like us really. Which I thought was cool but it just wasn’t shown anywhere near enough. All they ended up being was a basic antagonist to shoot at.
All Battle: LA is in the end of the day, is an entertaining movie. Something to watch while you shovel popcorn in your mouth. You don’t need to use much thought here, I mean, you’ve probably seen it all before.
Overall, Battle: Los Angeles does very little that we haven’t seen before. In theory I should give it two stars but I think it just scrapes a three, simply because, though it did nothing different, it still kept me entertained. And for that, it deserves at least some credit.
Final Verdict: 3 Stars. Nothing new, but entertaining enough.
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