B:LA = ID4 Redux
This year we have Battle: Los Angeles. What’s its creative angle? Independence Day as a combat movie. That’s about as unique as it gets.
The film stars Aaron Eckhart (great as always) as Staff Sergeant Nantz, who is on his way to the civilian life when the beaches of Santa Monica are suddenly attacked by dozens of unknown enemies that appeared from meteors that fell into the Pacific from space. Nantz’s retirement is immediately postponed and he is assigned to a unit of Marines whose mission is to search and rescue any surviving civilians who might be in an LAPD station before a hasty napalm strike blows through. The film tries introducing each member of the unit, but you won’t remember their names; they’re only distinguishable as types (the black guy with glasses, the South African guy, the leader, the nervous newbie, etc.) and you probably won’t have a favorite.
Battle: Los Angeles is about an alien invasion. But it’s mostly about how a specific group of Marines and civilians fight their way through the chaos of that invasion. The film reduces a world-wide event to a microcosm with a frantic style by Jonathan Liebesman (improving greatly on his critically-panned The Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel). This is one of the film’s strengths as it gives an immediacy that pulls one in in a manner we’ve only seen in war films.
Michelle Rodriguez, film’s current bad-ass poster girl, is soon found by the team. While Eckhart is the film’s anchor, Rodriguez gives us another reason to care about this team. She may always play a specific ‘type’ (one she’s openly admitting to being comfortable with), yet Rodriguez is that rare actress that can bring comfort or excitement to what is otherwise a rote character. She may not always survive (see: Avatar – as if anybody hasn’t already!), but she earns your trust. Her presence in Battle: Los Angeles is no different.
So, what this film gets right is at least a couple likable performances and an exciting angle on the alien invasion subgenre. The problem is nearly everything else.
The dialogue is about as dicey as the characters’ mission with lines like “I can help. I’m a veterinarian,” when an alien is being examined and “We already ate breakfast,” when a unit returns from enemy lines. Not only that, but these must be the chattiest Marines ever put to film! Once we are told our heroes are entering enemy territory, one would think they would keep lips tight and eyes alert. Not these guys, they keep yammering loudly about what they see and hear without once considering maybe they’d draw attention to themselves (they do). To make matters worse, they advance to their location in the middle of the street when there’s plenty of wreckage and debris they could use as cover. I was reminded of the Marines in Predator, who, when advancing on the enemy or happened upon a potential threat, would shut up and move silently, communicating only through hand signals. Those were a bunch of bad-asses who knew what they were doing. If the bumbling dolts in Battle: Los Angeles give an accurate sense of today’s best-of-the-best, then we’re in trouble.
That would all be excusable and somewhat nitpicky if the entire film hadn’t seemed so derivative. If you were born before 1990 then you will not be able to escape the feeling you’ve seen this movie before. That’s because it follows 1996’s Independence Day beat-for-beat: comets hurtling toward Earth, carefully watched by space pros; the destroyed military base (featuring same “view through fence” shot); inspiring speech (less maudlin here, but still); and the “if we figure out how to take the ship down the rest of the world will follow our lead” climax. Remember the scene in Independence Day when those army guys watched in a tank as the military tried hitting the spaceship with a nuclear warhead? Battle: Los Angeles is basically about THOSE guys, the guys we didn’t see for more than a few seconds fighting off the aliens and getting blown away or barely surviving. Imagine Independence Day without its coast-to-coast scale and huge cast of recognizable faces and you’ve got Battle: Los Angeles.
Because of this – and other films we’ve seen before – Battle: Los Angeles is also at times predictable. We know the rescue chopper will be blown up. We know the supposedly dead alien is going to create a jump scare. We know the pretty reporter who’s a little too close to the carnage is going to get blown away. Liebesman fails to surprise us at every turn.
Yet, despite all of this, I could give Battle: Los Angeles a marginal recommendation. It succeeds at drawing you in and providing thrills, with performances by Eckhart and Rodriguez that help us care. But I won’t. There’s just too much for the film to overcome and we are given too little to overlook its flaws. If you don’t mind seeing something you’ve seen before and love watching things blow up with vacuous, apocalyptic flair, you might not have completely wasted your time. Otherwise, beware: your time and money are better served waiting for a better bang for your buck to hit theaters.
4/10
Should you see it? Skip
Battle: Los Angeles is now in theaters.