After months and months of nervous anticipation, Battle: Los Angeles is finally in theaters. The least I can say is that it wasn’t an altogether bad movie, therefore sparing me some heartbreak had it just been an utterly terrible movie.
I wasn’t entirely disappointed, the chocolate almonds were good. Great even. And the concession chick was cute, too.
The movie had a decent pace of action. Basically Blackhawk Down with aliens, I love the idea of a movie where the aliens are soldiers too, waging urban warfare against our own, and are not entirely invincible either. Sure, they have better weapons, but ours work fine dammit!
I’m not altogether sure that their weapons were THAT much better. They didn’t really seem to do any more damage than our own, and the aliens had little to no strategy to begin with. Not like the Americans in the movie, whose strategy was clearly to put up a good defense. And in the words of the great John Madden, “The secret to a good defense is defense”. God bless him, may he rest in peace.
Wait, John Madden’s not dead!
He is to me. You don’t just not answer my fan mail and expect no consequences!
I seem to remember you uttering those words before police found you lurking in the bushes outside Burt Reynolds’ house.
Well, HE owed me money. That was different.
I think my biggest problem with the movie is that there are too many scenes that are dramatic to a fault, in between scenes that fail to be dramatic enough. When it came to the very invasion itself, what you see in the trailer is as little as you get out of the whole movie, leaving much more to be desired than five seconds of news footage of beachgoers fleeing the water. But in scenes like the ones involving Aaron Eckhart trying to rally the spirit of a young civilian boy (“I need you to be my little marine now!” he says) it was so over the top it was almost satirical.
And that brings me to a point I’d like to make about movies like this: why don’t they just let the events in these movies speak for themselves? It’s like these writers try so hard to tap into an audience’s emotions with these characters and their stupid back stories, who the hell cares? The preview was just fine without having to know a damn thing about the characters, it setup the premise, it showed us what the characters were up against, gave us a few slow motion shots set to some depressing music, threw in a U.S. fighter jet screaming over an American flag waving, and voila, that was all they needed to elicit an emotional response out of me, they got me to pay $10.50 just to see more! So why don’t they employ the same tactics to make movies as they do to make previews?
It’s funny you mention that, because what I’ve read in other reviews is that there isn’t enough background stories, just the same old clichés and nothing to make you care about the characters. That’s what makes us different… and might I add, better… than other critics: Hollywood doesn’t know what the hell we want in a movie, nor do we, but you damn well better have it in there!
I agree, to a point. The movie might have benefited from a deeper backstory, but if we’re talking about one written by the same writers that bungled what little backstory the movie has already, then forget it, it’s better off without it.
Some scenes I just had to laugh at, like the one where Staff Sargent Nantz decides they should tear open a wounded alien and figure out the fastest way to kill them, and one of the civilians they’ve rescued busts out, “I can help! I’m a veterinarian!”
No kidding! Why didn’t she just say, “Why yes, I’ve performed an alien autopsy before!” Just goes to show, convenience is a Hollywood staple, my friend. Now if only he could have stumbled upon a weapons expert and an astronomer, that would have been great. Maybe a man and wife team that he bumps into at the same time.
Oh, what could have been if we were the writers. I can see it now, the scene where the commander warns his troops to be back before the Air Force levels Los Angeles with their bombs, only one of the troops would ask, “Will this kill all the aliens?” and the commander would be like, “What aliens? There’s aliens?”
I love how all our best ideas come from Simpsons reruns.
Naturally. And I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t all too impressed by the aliens’ appearance. The funny head. The droopy eyes. But that’s enough about Michelle Rodriguez. The REAL aliens could have stood to appear way more threatening.
You know, I’m not sure if I even got a good look at any of them. For all I know they could have had the “Let’s all go to the lobby,” characters dancing across the screen in the background the entire time. But I find them frightening too, so it all worked out.
I will say to Michelle Rodriguez’s credit that she didn’t ruin the movie for me like she could have, though she did have one dumb line that came awfully close: “I didn’t make it this far because of my good looks!” SHUT UP Michelle Rodriguez, nobody asked you anything!
Having Ne-Yo in the cast is what worried me the most going in, but as it turns out, he wasn’t so bad. Better than the typical result of having a rapper in a movie, like Will Smith punching out an alien in ID-4 and going, “That’s what I call a close encounter!”
Now that’s what I’m talkin’ bout!
I was a little surprised that there was nothing included in the movie about the aliens having been watching us all this time, like we’d been seeing in some of the marketing leading up to the movie’s release, like all the pictures of various sightings from around the globe over the years. Not that I’m complaining, because that could have easily opened the door to the President wanting to go to Area-51 and just ruining the whole thing like Independence Day did.
Yeah, at least this movie has a much better ending than, “Go-go Gadget computer virus!” I like a movie where America wins its battles the old fashioned way, by fighting it out. The only way that would have been better to me was if instead of artillery rounds, we pelted them into submission with lawyers.
If you had to rate this movie, what would you give it?
Let’s see. Hmm… carry the six… “i” before “e”… denominator minus E=mc miniature two… who shot J.R… yep, a B- it is.