At this point, in the history of storytelling, the tale of the full-scale alien invasion seems as old and institutional as Arthurian legend. Thus so it was that the most beset upon city in the entire world, according to Hollywood, is once again subjected to alien nasty’s who are after something that is never fully explained and decide that killing everyone and everything is the best way to go about getting it. Lo’ our heroes, the ass-kickin’ U.S. Marine Corps (Ooh-Rah, Semper Fi etc. etc.), shalt step in to save us all, never leave a man behind and be the first to engineer a way to defeat a super intelligent race of space-travellers. But no-one sees these movies for plausibility, do they? All you really desire is to be evoked on the most basic level and watch things that go boom. All things considered, one thing you can never really accuse Battle: LA of not having is things that go boom.
Director Jonathan Liebesman set the record straight in the build up to the film’s release – all he wants is to make the most realistic alien invasion movie ever. However, the concept itself is grounded so much in fantasy it’s like saying “I want to make the most realistic Harry Potter movie ever” it’s only capable of getting so real. This in mind, though, Liebesman does a fairly good job on this front of the battleground for hearts and minds – Battle: LA is choc-a-bloc with military procedure and its Green Zone inspired, shaky, handheld camera style puts you in the thick of it while some nice wide-shots show the devastation of a city undergoing alien Shock And Awe. The realism backfires a little bit with the characters though, as our soldier heroes become a little too real, meaning they’re thoughtless meat-heads who you find difficult to actually associate with. The introduction is impressive enough and some nice use of subtitling introduces us to our squad of defenders. Sadly, the first 20 minutes or so of expositional backstories turns out to be completely pointless on almost all counts. There’s the one getting ready to marry his sweetheart, the 18 year-old virgin dweeb who just signed up, a moustachioed wise-ass who genuinely looks like he was ripped straight out of Predator, while Michelle Rodriguez gets her butch-thing on once again to display her two classic emotions - anger and sneering at stuff (if that counts as an emotion). And of course our protagonist, veteran soldier Aaron Eckhart, (who’s only one day from retirement!) has some leadership issues after a fatal mishap on his last tour. Naturally Liebesman just wants you to feel for his characters, but you can’t shake the feeling you’d care a hell of a lot more if you were given room to breathe instead of being spoon-fed how fraternal and caring they really are. This is the core of all Battle: LA’s problems, it might just be the most derivative movie ever made. It’s hard to pin-point exactly which movie it rips off the most, you could say it’s like Independence Day by way of Black Hawk Down, or perhaps Saving Private Ryan meets District 9. Of course this won’t be such a bad thing to most people, it only rips off great movies, and we’re not exactly expecting Shakespeare, are we? But the script is so hideously awful you begin to view Battle: LA’s unoriginality as less harmless referencing and more raping your favourite films. Eckhart’s troubled Staff Sergeant is the most coloured of all Battle: LA’s cardboard cut-outs but sadly he’s coloured in with children’s crayons. The never ending epic speeches water down your empathy for the tenacious warriors; there’s only so many times you can be told the virtue of duty and the Marines-Never-Give-Up spirit before you want to just slap them all.
The plot, initially, seems linear enough as our meat-heads must rescue a small group of civilians, who are even less developed, and get them away from the coast before the Air Force blows it all to kingdom come. On top of this the action is actually pretty good, not biblical, but certainly good urban warfare. Explosions abound and you may even jump a couple of times as our Marines battle through the streets and do their best to figure out how to kill a completely unknown enemy. This is the films true element, which it should have stayed in more - procedural shoot-outs which bring the film as close to gritty realism as it ever gets. An extended shoot-out on the freeway is particularly notable and the finale ain’t that bad at all. It never reaches the kinetic levels of a truly great actioner, but its efforts are definitely admirable. You get the feeling that this could have been something great, there may even be a very good film in there somewhere, an all-American District 9 perhaps; however the blood and guts of a full on war movie are culled in favour of a 12A rating while the fun absurdity of a Michael Bay-style blockbuster is lost through an almost painful lack of chemistry and humour. That’s not to say that the script doesn’t try to be funny, emphasis on “try” in that sentence. Even the realism of the action gets a bit spoilt by the relentless in-your-face heroism of the soldiers who make 300’s Spartans look like poets. The films tagline, however, promises us that “This is only the beginning” – and judging by the success at the US box office it may very well be. The prospect of a sequel isn’t horrific either as the film touches, very briefly, upon some interesting ideas: the motivation of the alien invaders (they seem to be interested in our water) as well as their nature and biology. With some improvements made, this could turn out to be something good. Right now though this is just a juvenile attempt at making Independence Day for the Call Of Duty generation. Except Call Of Duty actually has better writing.
5/10
Battle-Weary
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