Battle: Los Angeles PG 13
The movie, Battle Los Angeles is like watching an extended version of 'Black Hawk Down' but someone has grafted aliens over the resistance fighters, or like GI Joe with aliens, so it's like a prequel to 'Battlefield Earth'. The main issue with the story is its disconnect from any kind of plot or logic. Apart from some brief news reels where a man guesses at the nature of the aliens, they are essentially faceless cybernetic Predator/ID4 grays/Squids.
This movie could have been awesome, a sort of Independence Day ground war riff, but it came off at times like the 'Resident Evil' sequels, with marines fending off multiple rounds of alien plasma guns, and at other times being blasted.
The movie takes off just after the invasion of Earth, with flashbacks to three days earlier when a Marine group takes off to defend Los Angeles civilians before the Air Force is going to nuke part of it. Aaron Eckhart's rather bland sergeant acts like a flustered Duke from GI Joe, and his one and only hubris is that in a previous war he was the only survivor of a platoon, and his new group has one soldier who was the brother of a man from that platoon who died. That is the extent of the back story. The rest of the guys are a fresh and green Lieutenant, a gutsy human and his son, a lost Air Force commando, and various 'red shirts' who get killed off one by one.
Thank goodness it was not in 3 D. Yes, it is better than Resident Evil 4, the movie, but it is not much better, and the main problem is just the same, a nearly unstoppable Human fighting force must overcome an invincible faceless alien force, or they'll die trying. Horah!
Is it took much to ask that a villainous alien race have some back story? Even the aliens in 'District 9' had a plot, and had reasons for being, that the audience got to see. Ironically there humans were the enemy. In 'Predator' the alien is clever and is several steps ahead of the commandos as they figure out what traps it set. And they were trying for Predator territory here, unfortunately using Predator 2, Battle in Los Angeles as their model, and a slew of first person shooter video games. Granted the motivations of the Psychlos in 'Battlefield Earth' were stupid. But even in the far superior battle drama cartoon Robotech (Macross saga), the alien bad guys had motivations. The Zentraedi craved war. The Masters wanted the energy from the Protoculture matrix. The Invid too wanted energy and resources.
The audience at BLA though is left to wonder many things from this, ranging from the ridiculous amount of energy and materials it would take to actually take over 40 countries via coastal city landings, and how they could have engineer the transformative ships and things. Not once was there any dialog, and there could have been some, where the aliens were harvesting car parts to make ships or something.
Even in Transformers the Decepticons appeared to have a finite energy source in their Cube, in that it could be destroyed.
But no, these aliens are faceless, motiveless really, and appear only interested in blasting the crap out of everything in sight. This would expend far more resources than had they merely flown over the oceans, blasted the satellite network with an EMP pulse, and then scattered all of the humans as they fell back into the dark ages.
Now the movie 'Aliens' for example was able to convey motivation well on both sides. The space marines in that movie were there to rescue the colony, but the evil company knew the aliens were there. They had Ripley and she directed them in what the aliens could do, and that their queen was only interested in harvesting humans as hosts, and killing the rest.
An explanation would have been nice, but even with ID4, the movie this is clearly a stepchild of, that never really happened. If the aliens in this movie were just here to kick some butt, that's kind of stupid. And with such a small force of meteor ships, did they really think they stood a chance? It's improbable they would really. The irony is they actually start winning!
But with guts there is glory, and our heroes will get out of it, because they are marines! Good popcorn rental. Don't pay full price to see it in theaters. Semre fei, huyah.
Review by Adam Browne
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