Almost all alien invasion movies bother me a little. In Steven Spielberg's ‘War of the Worlds’, you follow a family through their adventure: surviving an alien attack and the emotional turmoil of people getting blown to smithereens all around them. In some scenes, you see the military running to fight the aliens. Yet all I thought was “What are they doing?” and “ I want to see more of their story”. In ‘Independence Day’, you see Will Smith flying around in his fighter, attacking an alien ship. “OK, cool, we are going see some crap!’’ but not really. Instead, we see quick shots of planes getting blown up and cut-backs to the President screaming “ Get them out of there!”, like hes the only one that knows whats going on. So I always asked myself, “Can you have an Alien Invasion movie about just the military fighting the aliens, and stop with the cut-backs to the “civilians” who are emotionally involved? Well, I think this movie is trying to answer just that.
‘Battle: Los Angeles’, promises action and excitement. In reality, the majority of the movie was spent following characters who were whining in buildings, talking about their feelings.The movie starts out strong, and I love the “Tarentino” thing they did in the beginning: i.e. “lets show some awesome battle stuff, then flashback 24 hours.” Its a great way to get your audience excited for things to come, then show some character development.
As the movie started to introduce the characters, I felt more and more cheated. “Lets focus on too many characters, so you don’t care whether they die or not,” great plan. When the action finally starts again, you are happy, but when you realize it’s going to be a bunch of shaky camera shots, and can’t really make out whats going on, your brain stops caring. At least if this movie had some good action to fall back on, it would make up for the simple-minded character development and the absence of plot.
I do want to talk about some plot points that I thought were interesting, so SPOILERS for the rest of this paragraph. There is a scene where the military captures one of the aliens and they try to figure out how to kill it (they had been having trouble with that before). Well, they proceed to cut it up and torture the crap out of it . I know it’s not a real creature, and it’s “war,” but I felt like this scene was unnecessary.
MORE SPOILERS: One of the plot points is that a giant alien ship controls the other small ships. Hmm, wait, that sounds familiar. This made me very mad; it’s too easy! Why? They needed some epic thing for them to destroy at the end. Everything that involved this “control ship” bored me, which is most of the last 40 minutes. Why would an alien race make such an easy target? It doesn’t make sense. Lets make one ship that if you destroy it takes out all our ships. great plan guys. END SPOILERS
So what does this movie have to show for its self? Interesting characters? Nope. Good action? No. Original plot? Not really. I couldn’t even tell if the special effects were good because of all the shaky camera stuff. I know they are trying to be intense, and it works when its done right, but when the characters get blown up at the end, and you don’t really care, what’s the point? I think you will feel the same way I did at the end: you just want it to be over. So do you have to make a movie about the civilians for the benefit of the audience? Can I empathize with military troops? I feel like this movie had a good idea, and I was excited to see it, but it falls flat.
The Rating System
Production (Directing, Editing, Music) 2-5
Story (Plot) 2-5
Characters (Likability, Acting) 3-5 (for acting only)
Writing (Dialogue, Cleverness) 2-5
Emotions (Was it; Fun, Scary, Sad, Do I care)1-5
Overall score 10-25
