Film Review: Battle Los Angeles

Upon seeing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen two years back, I didn't have the same exact reaction that most people had for it. It was quite honestly one of the worst films of that year, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't enjoyable. I've found such gleeful pleasure out of some really terrible films, and this film continues along that same sort of line. If you go into Battle: Los Angeles with the idea that you're above both the film and the audience watching it, and you just let loose on what's so ridiculous about it, you'll enjoy yourself. You won't be enjoying it for any of the right reasons, but you'll get a lot more out of it than going into it with an entirely critical mind frame.

The plot of this film in a nutshell, aliens invade the planet and the military forces try to protect their city. In less of a nutshell, the dumbest clueless marines in Los Angeles go in to protect their city from "meteors", and there's no way that it could possibly be anything other than meteors, right? That's pretty much the mindset that these marines go into the field with, as if they don't know exactly what is going on. It brings me back to From Dusk Till Dawn, where George Clooney states pretty damn quickly that they're up against vampires. We don't have that in this film, so we get a lot of needlessly frantic scenes of soldiers shouting and panicking.

The premise of this feature is ludicrous, because a large team of soldiers goes into the war grounds to rescue a grand total of five civilians. That seems like a complete waste of man power. Whatever happened to sacrificing the few illegal immigrants that got left behind for the greater good. That's what I would do. That's what anyone would do. Getting back to the group of soldiers, there is just far too many of them. Going into this film, we had way too much exposition for each of these individual losers, and it exceeds the proper amount of characters you should have in a motion picture. Then when we're in enemy territory, we take on five more soldiers, including the laughably abominable Michelle Rodriguez.

So when the time came that soldiers finally started getting killed, I couldn't have been happier. When that helicopter exploded, I applauded the disposal of useless characters that we didn't need. Unfortunately we still had Michele Rodriguez and Ramon Rodriguez (unrelated) whose last cinematic endeavor was in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen as a Shia LaBeouf clone. I don't remember the names of any of the characters, because I quite honestly didn't care. When they died, I was just so happy about, which shouldn't happen in a great film. On the other hand, this isn't a great film, or a good one.

The acting is uniformally awful for most participants, but I of course reserve special consideration for Aaron Eckhart. He's a solid actor, but is not given much to work with. One particular monologue he delivers right towards the end of the film is just so poorly written that you have to laugh at it. I still have nothing but love for Eckhart, but he's just poorly served. As for the action, it's alright, but it's not what it's supposed to be. Those who saw The Hurt Locker know how war time action should be portrayed, and it's devoid of music so to cause an atmosphere of intensity. They don't do that with this one, instead going the obvious way out with music accentuating every single plot detail before it happens. It makes everything so damn predictable, not that it wasn't before.

When a dog comes out of the smoke of a battle field, you know that the enemy is laying a trap, but apparently this marine platoon is just that plain stupid not to get that cliche. None of the cinematography in this film evokes the gritty and hopeless atmosphere that war should be. Battle: Los Angeles is enjoyable if not taken seriously, but it's not in any terms a good film. It's in the Michael Bay arena of cinema excitement, which doesn't say much.

D+