Halfway through Battle: Los Angeles, I thought to myself, who honestly thought this was a good idea? Then I thought...why am I still sitting here? Yes, this is already in contention for worse film of 2011.
Los Angeles, and a platoon of Marines are ordered to help evacuate people from the city after a possible meteor shower is heading their way. Oh, hang on, they are not meteors but an alien attack that means the Marines must now fight to save the city. The small group, who discover civilians hiding in a police station, must get them to a safe zone but find themselves face to face with aliens...and more aliens...and...
Oh hell, why am I wasting the space to give you a plot run-down. The film doesn't have a story. It doesn't have character development. It doesn't have humour, or pathos, or irony, or anything that almost all the other alien invasion movies have. It does have every clichés in the book and some that haven't even been invented yet.
It is also relentless. From the second the film starts you are in the battle and director Jonathan Liebesman must have studied Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down as it has the same style of film making. It looks like Black Hawk, and feels like Black Hawk. It even has a helicopter crashing. It doesn't have nay of Scott's cinematic touches, like tension. It is a two hour battle scene and trust me, after 30 minutes you are desperate for the battle to stop and so we can get to know the characters, or maybe have a little light relief.
Sorry, there is plenty of light relief. The script has some of the worse lines heard. My personal favourite is when top soldier Aaron Eckhart, who lost most of his last platoon and cannot live it down, is explaining to his new platoon how the memories of the dead soldiers are engraved in his head, and starts reciting their names and numbers, only to end this impassioned speech with 'But that's not important right now!'
Aaron Eckhart is a very good actor, who has been in some very good movies, but here he is far too serious, as are everyone else. I even, and this is how dull this movie is, craved for Independence Day, a film I really don't like that much. At least it was silly enough not to be taken seriously.
Sure the special effects are impressive but if you imagine sitting next to someone playing a shoot-'em-up video game and not letting you have a go, for two hours, then you will know what to experience here.
The aliens look like a cross between the Alien, Predator and a Transformer so nothing original at all. Their purpose for this invasion? To take the Earth's water. Wasn't that David Bowie's mission in The Man Who Fell To Earth? Yes, my friends, if you want to see this film, go watch a number of other alien invasion movies that have done it so much better.
One of the dullest films I have had to sit through and no matter how much they blow up another car or building, it just gets duller by the moment
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