Battle: Los Angeles was surprisingly a very entertaining experience. Rotten Tomatoes give it a rating of 33% and movie critics have been basing it to pieces. This had convinced me not to go watch it in the theater. However after watching it on my not so big screen and minimal sound system (MacBook), I regretted my decision. If I were to ignore the online movie ratings and those uptight movie critics, I would have had a hell of a time watching it on the silver screen with standard cinema quality sound system.
Battle: Los Angeles is a no-nonsense straight up alien invasion action movie, it is the U.S. Marines versus world invading aliens. There is nothing thought provoking about the movie’s storyline, which is fine by me, the Oscar season has long gone, and I’m looking forward for movies with lots of shooting and big explosions. Battle: L.A. delivers that.
The plot is typical to the alien invasion genre. The aliens are here and we have to fend them off. This time the aliens in Battle: L.A. they go straight to killing humans. These aliens take no prisoners and they just straight out shoots at anything that moves. There were no warnings and the aliens show no signs of mercy.
I guess it’s easier for them the aliens to get whatever they want from our planet once they had get rid of all of us. You know how the U.S. were at Iraq to take their oil? Well the aliens are here to take our water, funny how the shoe is on the other foot. Than again, the aliens didn’t bothered to come out with any excuses of liberating the poor native though, they just went straight to killing.
Needless to say, the whole planet wasn’t prepare for this alien onslaught. All hell broke loose all over the planet in all major cities. My guess is that the alien’s first target are the area with the most population, which is all the major cities.
The U.S. military decides to just bomb the whole city as it gets over run by aliens. We follow a squad of U.S. Marines trying to get as many civilians they could find out of the drop zone. It wasn’t an easy task. There were one scene where they were ambushed in the middle of the street with the aliens shooting from above, sort of looks like a war movie from Iraq or Afghanistan.
The whole movie was shot like a war movie and it sure feels like one. Imagine Black Hawk Down but with aliens. First scene of the aliens attacking as come out from the sea and to the beach sort of reminds me of war films on D-Day the Normandy landings on World War II where the allied forces attack the Germans, only there wasn’t anybody shooting at the aliens this time.
There is not explanation about the aliens, and we also only see glimpse of them as they ambush the soldiers. No names were given, there were no character development for the aliens. There were some character development for the Marines that we follow throughout the movie, but were kept very minimal.
The first part of the film tries to make you attached to the Marine characters, giving you some back story, but I couldn’t care less. This is not an emotional film, at least I don’t think that it tries to be one.
What I love the most about Battle: Los Angeles is that they uses real world weapons that are available today, against the aliens. The aliens are tough enough to be scary but are not invincible.
They actually uses a laser guided copperhead missiles to hit the alien command and control center, which does not involves something lame like hijacking an alien ship and uploading a virus to the alien computer system. It’s real weapon against aliens. I love that the use the term “command and control” instead of “the mother ship”.
There is no over the top “Michael Bay”-ish moments where things fly from every single direction and the camera does a slow motion 360 turn on the actors. The movie was shot in somewhat documentary style like how a war movie.
It is clear who the main star is in this movie. It is not Aaron Eckhart or Ne-yo, it is not the aliens or Los Angeles, the main star of this movie is the United States Marine Corps. I have no problem with that.
Battle: Los Angeles reminds me that we sometimes have to ignore online ratings with those uptight know-it-all movie critics and just go for it. Battle: Los Angeles feels just like a really good first person shooter game. Anybody who are fans of the Call of Duty or Battlefield game franchise would definitely love this movie.
Give this movie a try if you are a fan of alien invasion movies or a fan of war movies.
