Battle Los Angeles (2011)
Cruise back over here Skyline, all is forgiven – at least that film knew its limitations. I’ve covered alien invasions fairly often on this blog, from Cloverfield to Monsters, and District 9 to The Day The Earth Stood Still, it’s a sub-genre of SF cinema that I’ve always enjoyed for its Armageddon instincts, the attendant pyrotechnics and SFX when conquered correctly can be a berserk couple of hours at the flicks that sometimes has an obscured message on themes of a global humanity, adversity in the face of extermination, the bloody and shameful history of colonisation or maybe just the simplistic and adolescent glee of seeing loads of stuff getting blown up, an optic adventure that I and I suspect many others find quite the cathartic experience. Battle Los Angeles fails to deliver any of these qualities, even as a popcorn movie it is annihilated on every level – lowest common denominator film-making should at least be exciting – but this film is a dull and dreary affair from start to finish and quite honestly I couldn’t exit the cinema swiftly enough.
A neophyte marine platoon is assigned to Los Angeles following the threatening sight of a phalanx of meteors crashing into the Pacific coast line, a crisis that is simultaneously occurring along the shorelines of the major cities of the planet. Curiously this detachment of fighting fellows are a perfectly balanced ethnic demographic of West Coast America including a Latino platoon leader, a couple of African-Americans (one of whom is planned his wedding, awww), a Korean American, a couple of white dudes and a Nigerian whom is awaiting the confirmation of his noble US citizenship – so that’s all potential sectors of the audience covered and a truly heartwarming vision of a cosy multi-cultural America. A senior officer, Staff Sergant Nantz (a sleepwalking Aaron Eckhart) is also assigned to the squad, he has recently lost some men whilst on maneuvers in Afghanistan and I kid you not, it’s the day of his retirement, and the brother of one of his casualties is amongst the squad – cue dramatic friction. These sentient meteorites soon mutate into the first wave of a homicidal alien extermination force and our heroes are deployed into the war zone, being tasked with fighting to a nearby police station to locate and rescue a terrified clutch of civilians. En route they make contact with the superior alien firepower and manage to pick up a few stragglers from similarly depleted squadrons (including an inert Michelle Rodriguez) but the battle is not going in humanity’s favour and only a suicide mission can potentially turn the tide of war…
This film gave me post traumatic stress disorder. I thought Ebert may have been a bit harsh with his half a star review, having seen the movie I think he’s been generous. Battle Los Angeles is boring, deathly boring, from its contemporarily tasteless opening to its sequel threatening denouement. The movie is captured in that tiresome twitchy-cam which eclipses any possibility of establishing the dimensions of a combat sequence, not that they are in any way designed to evoke any sense of excitement or adrenaline. The best thing I can say about the CGI is that it’s adequate, but as is usual these days all the potential awe-inspiring establishing panoramas of the scale of the destruction are stuffed into the trailer. Worst of all the film is stunningly jingoistic, every close encounter is punctuated with a hideous ‘character scene’, packed with all the clichéd male bonding and glory of the flag antics you could possibly imagine (including military drumming soundtrack accompaniments) culminating in a speech from Eckhart that makes Pullman’s moment in Independence Day look like a masterpiece of understatement. The dialogue would be priceless if it wasn’t so banal – ‘Marines never retreat’, ‘You’ll obey my orders goddamnit’, ‘I’d follow you to hell’ although my favourite – ‘Can I help? I’m a veterinarian’ was unintentionally hilarious. Any attention on the invaders themselves is mere lip service to the tedious fireworks, from a genre perspective this is the films biggest failure as there is virtually no thought given to the interlopers psychology, their motives, their civilisation or biology, in fact due to the films editing and filming techniques you never get a good look at the nasty little blighters. As a computer game this would be fun – and the cynic in me wonders if this wasn’t the primary driver of this project – as there is certainly nothing else going on here. So, overall, avoid at all costs. For a far more exciting and humourous few hours of alien carnage I humbly submit the terrific The Blob remake which I revisited last night, featuring a surprising appearance from Jack Nance (always a treat) and a knowing script from Frank Darabont it’s a fun B-Movie pastiche that doesn’t skimp on the slaughter. Failing that Starship Troopers is always a treat, at least that film had a sense of humor, some political subterfuge and some terrific kinetics.
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