Battle: Los Angeles (2011)

Most promotional items refer to this film as Battle: Los Angeles, but some have abbreviated it to Battle: LA. They wouldn’t abbreviate that first word, though, because then it would read BLA. Unfortunately for sci-fi and action fans, that would be truth in advertising, because this movie is blah, blah, blah.

How can an alien invasion movie be blah? By ripping off elements of other alien invasion movies and shaky-cam you-are-there war films, heavily garnished with clichés and bad dialogue, often inaudible due to explosions and gunfire, and all delivered by two-dimensional characters the audience doesn’t care about. We’ve seen all of this before.

In fact, the movie opens as the invasion is already beginning, with news reports of large “meteor showers” falling near the coastline of major cities around the world. But just when I thought this would be the rare film that doesn’t waste time with lengthy exposition, we’re soon flashing back 24 hours for an introduction to the stick-figure characters who’ll serve as Marines and Our Heroes for the next two hours.

This is exactly the way last year’s stupid alien invasion flick Skyline started. The thought crossed my mind that I could just copy my Skyline review and change the title and names, but that would be cheating you, dear reader. No, my job is to tell you how movies like this rob me of my time and money, so please take a moment to lament us poor critics who suffer the slings and arrows of outrageously bad cinema in order to serve as your last line of defense. But enough about me. Let’s get back to the Marines.

Look, it’s Aaron Eckhart! Always a solid actor, he’s one of the few positive elements of this film. His character, a decorated staff sergeant with a rumored reckless streak (of course), is turning in his retirement papers when the alien ships start falling from the sky. His superior officer halts the paperwork, and Eckhart has to postpone his retirement and again lead a squad into battle (of course). During this laborious exposition, we’re introduced to the other soldiers of Eckhart’s squad, with their names captioned on-screen as though we’re supposed to care about a bunch of thinly-drawn characters who will mostly be toast before the movie’s over. They include the usual types–the weak-willed second lieutenant assigned to his first combat command, the Jersey guy, the virgin, the corpsman, and the seething corporal (Ne-Yo) who resents Eckhart’s character because his brother died under the sergeant’s command.

If you pay close attention during this needless and boring exposition sequence, you’ll notice one of the film’s major flaws: It’s all filmed with handheld cameras. The shaky camerawork might be acceptable for action sequences, but it can still be overused. When Eckhart and his superior are seated in an office across a desk from one another, there’s no reason for the camera to be moving around, bouncing the speaker’s head within the frame, and zooming in and out. It looks like the footage my old man shot on vacation when he first bought a camcorder and couldn’t figure out how to work the buttons. There should be a disclaimer: No tripods were touched during the making of this film.

The filmmakers employ this shaky, handheld camerawork ostensibly to evoke memories of thick-of-battle movies like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, and Full Metal Jacket. But what that visual style really does is camouflage shortcomings in the special effects. We get a lot of glimpses of the aliens and their various machines and weaponry, but we never get a really good look at any of it, not even in what could have been the most interesting scene in the movie, when Eckhart and a civilian–a female veterinarian–reach into the oozing guts of an alive but wounded alien to try and figure out how to kill the creature. Outdoors, there’s so much smoke and dust and debris that surprisingly little alien stuff is shown in any detail at all. Would it have killed the filmmakers to stop for just a second with the fast edits, blurry camera, and explosive sound effects, and give the audience a good visual payoff?

Even the welcome mid-film arrival of Michelle Rodriguez–cornering the market, after Lost and Avatar, as a gun-toting badass Latina–doesn’t help to balance the weight of the clichéd tripe one can see coming a mile away. Examples include the crying children the Marines have to rescue (especially the one with the dying Hispanic father), the inexperienced lieutenant wussing out, the planned attacks that end in failure, and the inevitable face-to-face confrontation between the sergeant and that seething, resentful corporal.

Battle: Los Angeles will get an “Ooh-rah!” from Marines and other servicemen (the movie even copies The Hurt Locker at its end), but it doesn’t hold a flamethrower to James Cameron’s Aliens. And for anyone who’s seen Independence Day, District 9, V, War of the Worlds, or any other alien invasion tale, there’s nothing new or worthwhile here. I think I even liked Skyline more than this.