Battle: Los Angeles is a thoroughly depressing and numbing event. You’d be forgiven for crying after witnessing it purely out of sadness for the art of cinema.
Aliens are colonising the Earth and Los Angeles is the American military’s last stand. Two hours of bombastic combat later and I think we all know who is going to come out on top, but to quote the poster for Alien vs Predator ‘Whoever wins, we lose’. We being the moviegoer, who has to sit through this endless parade of sequences designed like video game levels, nauseating handheld camerawork, soldiers screaming identical dialogue at one another and deafening sound design. If the visual effects are nice, scene after scene of grenade and gunfire between gung-ho American marines and robot invaders soon puts any visual pizazz to rest.
Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight, Rabbit Hole) plays Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz, a Marine who is conveniently just days away from retiring. To say he has emotional baggage is a no-brainer. You see, he lead a troop of young men into battle in Afghanistan and many of them died. Now with a new ragtag group of soldiers, all of whom don’t want to be around him, he must make this collective work in order to defeat the extraterrestrials.
Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart)
Not much is learnt about the aliens. Their most telling feature is that they were able to conquer a planet and yet lose all ability to aim in man-on-man combat. How very Battlefield Earth of director Jonathan Liebesman (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) and screenwriter Christopher Bertolini who obviously don’t care enough. They care slightly more about the humans, but just barely. In fact, if there’s one thing to really praise Battle: LA for its it realistic inclusion of minorities. It’s a shame they’re all nameless nobodies that only the most attentive viewer will be able to distinguish apart from one another. Excluding, maybe, Michelle Rodriguez (Avatar) who manages a modicum of screen presence purely by being the sole female fighter in the bunch.
TSgt. Elena Santos (Michelle Rodriquez)
It doesn’t help that these men inhabit all the worst stereotypes of American culture. Routinely spouting awful dialogue that’s one part rah-rah patriotism, one part clichéd inspiration, one part insipid dumb-headedness. Dialogue is perhaps this movie’s weakest aspect; Bertolini’s screenplay is filled with such clangers as “it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before” (duh, they’re aliens) and “maybe I can help, I’m a veterinarian!”. When the aliens’ spaceship, the size of the Eureka Tower, emerges out of the ground one soldier yells “I CAN SEE IT!”
Battle: Los Angeles debuted at number 1 in America last weekend and will probably do the same here. While it may be hyperbolic to decry this as the death of cinema, especially with such brilliant science-fiction like Monsters so fresh in the memory, but it’s a soul-crushing experience that will remain the barometer of all bad movies for 2011.
Battle: Los Angeles is released nationally on March 17th
Director: Jonathan Liebesman
Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Ramon Rodriguez, Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Pena, Ne-Yo,
Bridget Moynahan, Cory Hardict and Gino Anthony Pesi.
Images provided by SonyPicturesAU
I think the biggest sin of BATTLE: LA (outside of the awful dialogue and paper-thin characters) is that it totally failed to use its aliens to make any kind of insightful point in the way that films MONSTERS or DISTRICT 9 did. At first it seemed the film was shapping up into a kind of allegory for the invasion of Iraq, but it soon descended into stupid cliches and mindless “ooh-ra”ing. Good review