Review: Battle: Los Angeles

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When I was a young man in junior high, 25 years ago, I read a passage about a group of young men, cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy who were the last desperate stand of resistance against an unstoppable alien invasion. The author created such an image of heroism that for the next five years it was my entire goal to one day be a cadet at the Air Force Academy.

It took the first Iraq war to scare me away from that path.  The author of that piece was L. Ron Hubbard, and the book was Battlefield: Earth, which was eventually adapted into one of the worst films ever made, a film that flushed John Travolta's career so far down the toilet only Quentin Tarantino could reach down and pull him out. Battle: Los Angeles may be for this generation what that book was for me.  It plays exactly like a two-hour commercial for the US Marines.

Aaron Eckhart is the sergeant, haunted by the loss of his last platoon, ready to retire, forced by an alien invasion to take a batch of new recruits just out of training into the heart of combat on a mission to find and retrieve any civilians in the area before the bombs are dropped to stop the invaders.

The rest of the cast is forgettable. Like a child playing with green plastic soliders, they are expendable.  At most, each is given a token introduction, a shot with a wife or girlfriend/fiancee.  Unfortunately, after each interruption, zero time is spent developing those characters or revisiting their loved ones. People may compare this to Independence Day, but as campy as that movie is, the audience is emotionally engaged with the characters. Vivica Fox and Will Smith, Bill Pullman and Mary McDonnell, all spend the majority of the film trying to reunite with their loved ones.  Battle: Los Angeles doesn't give us this. It's nothing more than a combat operation from beginning to end, with no aspirations of having any actual plot or character development. Eckhart's character has no family, no loved ones.  The only friend we ever even get to see is his commanding officer.  He's something of a super-soldier, but we know nothing more about him than any character shot and killed in the first battle.

Setting aside the lack of plot or characters, I was disappointed by Battle: Los Angeles for one major reason. Namely, you could have removed the alien invasion from the script, picked up all the characters and dropped them in Vietnam and still have had the same movie.  Everything is that generic, that a script cut and pasted with random pages from a pile of rejected Vietnam war scripts would be more original. The aliens (of which we actually see extremely minimal close-up time) use fairly conventional weaponry and really terrible tactics but have somehow managed to devastate over 30 cities.

The final nail in the coffin for me (warning: I'm about to get a little spoilery) is the insultingly bad science. The Core managed to get more correct than this garbage.  The hoo-ah begins right away when the aliens crashland into the ocean, appearing at first to be meteors. First, a news report warns of tsunamis caused by them crashing into the ocean. Then, during a military briefing, we're told they slowed down on entry, landing at less than terminal velocity. It goes on, when we find out the air units are unmanned drones controlled by a central command center. The entire premise of the last act is that by taking out this center, the drones will all be nullified. Any idiot would expect they're programmed for a minimal level of autonomy. Even our primitive earthling UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have that.

The final, most disgusting perversion of science is when we're told the aliens are using our precious water as the source of their power, and that unbelievably, ocean levels are already dropping. How many kinds of wrong can this be?  One: They supposedly invade Earth, because it's the only place we've found with liquid water (not true) Two: Simply by landing and shooting up a few military vehicles, they've caused a measurable difference in ocean levels (where did all that water go, sucked into a black hole perhaps?) Three: They land in the ocean as meteors and instead of staying out there hidden in the water, sucking the oceans dry for power, they waste that attacking cities in the least efficient way possible.

They do not hesitate to kill humans, but they didn't bother to bombard us with actual meteors or chemical weapons. They have drones but sent in living troops.  These aliens are advanced, but they are stupid. The more I think about it, the more upset I am with this aspect of the film.

Great effects can often satisfy me when other people need to pick apart a movie, and Battle: Los Angeles has a lot of the look of one of my favorites, District 9 or another film I recently reviewed, Skyline. Battle: Los Angeles could never hope to be as good as District 9, and couldn't possibly be as bad as Skyline, but it's too mediocre for me to care. I walked out of the theater thinking to myself, "Yep, I just saw a movie."  Good for those who like head-bobbing cameras and have short attention spans (no shot is longer than 3 seconds) and can't be bothered to think about what they're watching.