Battle: Los Angeles: one star
Rated: PG-13 for violence and coarse language
There’s not much I can say about Battle: Los Angeles that probably hasn’t been said by others in my field. It’s loud, chaotic, and an absolute mess. It’s a slap in the face to science-fiction, both the science and fiction, as well as the hyphen in between.
The film starts off with a meteor shower that hits all the major US cities, although one manages to end up in Ireland; it must have been bumped off course. The meteors are alien troops sent to our planet for unknown reasons. One person theorizes they’re here to harvest Earth’s natural resources, mainly water. The marines are then sent in to fight the extra-terrestrial troops. When their commanding officers tell them they will be fighting beings not of this world, no one seems to bat an eyelash, as though battling an army of alien life forms is a common occurrence for the Corp. This is when we meet Sgt. Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart), a twenty year veteran who sums up pretty much every war hero we’ve ever seen in cinema. I don’t even remember much of the other characters, other than they were a typical rainbow of ethnicities: Latino, Hispanic and African American. Their dialogue consists of mainly army terms: Get down!; Incoming!; Reloading!
Aaron Eckhart is a fine action hero. He actually makes the movie bearable. He struggles through the whole film with some skeleton in his closet that everyone knows about, but writer Christopher Bertolini is cagey to reveal. In fact, Bertolini doesn’t reveal much of anything in this film. The only characters who have more than one line of dialogue per scene are the news anchors who continually (and annoyingly) bring us updates of how the rest of the US is coping with this invasion.
I had high hopes for Battle: LA, as did a lot of other people I’ve spoken to. I love alien invasion movies. District 9 remains one of my all time favorites, mainly because the invasion doesn’t take place in the States, as most films are apt to do, but rather in South Africa. And why do they always have to come with hostile intentions? Would a race infinitely more advanced than ours really fly all the way across the universe just to destroy our planet? When you go to Disneyland with the family, do you go there packing heavy artillery with the intent of blowing the place up? Just food for thought.
‘Til next time! See you at the movies.
