Battle: Los Angeles (Review)

I have a whole lot of respect for the actors in Battle: Los Angeles. This is mostly because of the beating their voices must have taken while making this movie. Every day, for weeks upon weeks, these actors woke up at the break of dawn to go out and scream at each other all day. My voice doesn’t have anything resembling this kind of resilience. You make me scream for 15 minutes and I’ll be out of commission for the next few days. This group of actors screamed so much that they made a two-hour movie out of it. Sadly, nothing that comes out of their mouths is particularly intelligent, as it consists mostly of military movie clichés being bellowed at top volume. Battle: Los Angeles seems convinced that the tropes will be less obvious if only they yell them louder than anyone else.

Aaron Eckhart plays Staff Sergeant Nantz, a Marine who is a) about to retire, and b) has a dark past. This would seem to foreshadow a great deal of conflict, both internal and external, going forward. After the briefest bit of exposition, aliens invade, and it’s up to him and the rest of his Marines to defend Los Angeles from their deadly attack. Nantz is assigned a platoon of soldiers that can only be distinguished by skin color, and the rest of the film follows them in their quest to rid the world of this extraterrestrial evil.

Say what you will about Roland Emmerich, but at least he delivers his gigantic pieces of clichéd cheese with an approachable, goofy grin. He’s fonder of the slow, large shots that make it clear what the audience is looking at, and as a result we’re appropriately awed more often than not. As a contrast, Battle: Los Angeles director Jonathan Liebesman clearly went to the Michael Bay School of cutting as fast possible. There are barely any memorable visuals in this film because the filmmakers seem intent on not letting you see them. What should have been a fun popcorn romp turns into an unpleasant trudge that goes on at least a half hour too long. It’s a rip-off of most every alien movie ever made, just without the elements that make them any good.

Battle: Los Angeles also makes another crucial mistake: it shows us the aliens early and often, and they aren’t exactly revelatory. There’s something to be said for keeping movie aliens faceless, and if you go through every great extraterrestrial film ever made they’re able to retain a sense of mystery throughout. This film tips its hand far too early, and there are no surprises to be had in the film’s second half. Things just happen, there’s a lot of shooting and yelling, and it doesn’t end until you’re long past sick of it.

Let’s go back to 2009, and Neill Blomkamp’s terrific District 9. If you recall, the latter half of that movie consists of little more than action scenes and shouted profanity. Yet this works, because Sharlto Copley’s character had been fully fleshed out, and he continued to grow even amidst the chaos later on. Battle: Los Angeles works under the assumption that it can jump right into the fracas without making us care, and instead it repels rather than engrosses. Even when the film attempts to develop its characters, it only gives us things that we’ve seen before. One of the soldiers is getting married, another has a pregnant wife, and on top of it all there’s Eckhart’s brooding veteran. It’s hard to become interested in characters when we feel as if we already know them.

Despite its endless flaws, Battle: Los Angeles might play better as a rental, when the viewer has the ability to take the sound levels down a notch. What makes the theatrical experience so unpleasant is its determination to hit you over the head with the same cacophonous explosions, gunfire and screams over and over again for nearly two hours. After a while, the viewer becomes simultaneously bored and annoyed. Battle: Los Angeles is not remarkable for its imagination, visuals or characters. It is only remarkable for its volume.

Rating:  (out of 4)

P.S.- Is there an award for the Best Trailer ever made for a bad movie? Because the trailer for Battle: Los Angeles is one of my favorites in recent memory. If the final product had half the impact of this trailer, it could've been spectacular. By the way, notice how none of the characters talk.