Battle: Los Angeles
2011
Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Will Rothhaar, Bridget Moinahan, Ne-Yo and Jim Parrack
Written by: Christopher Bertolini
Directed by: Jonathan Liebesman
Although I'm a bigger fan of the Halo video game series, I've played Call of Duty and enjoy it. When you're in a firefight while traversing the roofs of a shanty town in Rio de Janeiro the game shines. You can't go in guns blazing. Instead, you need to crouch behind walls and systematically take out your enemy before you can move forward. It's urban combat at its finest and the first thing I thought of while watching Battle: Los Angeles.
The film opens at Camp Pendleton, just North of San Diego. It also opens with a checklist of clichés. We have the guy who is about to get married, the virgin who can't handle his liquor, the staff sergeant whose last battalion was lost in battle, which leaves a cloud over his head. There is the new lieutenant, fresh out of officer's school, who has been placed in charge of the marines. And since the staff sergeant is the lead character, he also needs to be retiring. In fact, his retirement papers are signed right as the supposed meteors are hitting the Earth. We soon see that the staff sergeant was forced to join a group of marines who supposedly are going to Santa Monica to help with the evacuation. It's then that they find out that these aren't meteors but actual ships crashing into the oceans and it seems that the Earth is being colonized. When this happens, the professor CNN brings in tells us that they are probably there for the resources and will kill the indigenous species, which would be humans.
The plot of the film is a lot like the missions in Call of Duty. You get a location and an objective, like getting to a police station in Santa Monica to evacuate the civilians hiding there. They have a ticking clock: 3 hours before the Air Force starts bombing the shit out of all of Santa Monica. The first half of the movie is about getting the civilians out of harms way and learning what they're up against, alien-wise. The action is frantic and the editing even more so. I don't know what happened that we need to cut so much? During the action I know it's supposed to build the urgency of the scenes, but it feels too fast. I think you could have accomplished the same thing without so many edits. Also, there are times when I want to get a good look at the surroundings, especially on the bombed out streets of Santa Monica, but we cut away and I can barely take it in. That's one of the great things about bombing the shit out of someplace you know. Don't take away my enjoyment.
The performances are what you'd expect from an action movie like this. There isn't a lot for the actors to work with but they handle it fine and Eckhart and Michelle Rodriguez do their best to inject quality. But it's not that kind of a movie. Actors are basically robots to the set pieces and they functioned like a well serviced Roomba 572. Liebesman's directing owes a great deal to Saving Private Ryan, Blackhawk Down and District 9, as well as the Call of Duty games. Some of the battle scenes look like they're directly from Saving Private Ryan and while I was never bored I never had a “wow, that's cool” moment from seeing something original.
One of the film's saving graces is that it's not in Real 3D, or what I refer to as the Sarah Palin of cinema. 3D is obnoxious and it seemed like this film was suited perfectly for it, so I thank the producers for not taking us down that road.
On the whole, Battle: Los Angeles is not original. It's an onion of clichés that feels like every other film I've seen in this genre. And while I sometimes wished I had a game controller in my hand while viewing it, I was never really bored. That said, I can't fully recommend the film.
I give Battle: Los Angeles a C+
Les
Here is the trailer:
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