Battle: Los Angeles

They weren’t likely to get a more ‘on side’ audience member than someone like me. Sure, possibly they’d have preferred me to have slightly fewer brain cells, and perhaps having never seen the likes of Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down would have made this movie pack way more punch. But, for everyone involved in Battle: Los Angeles, they had in me someone who went into the cinema willing it to be good. On paper it had my vote: a standard aliens invade earth to wipe out humanity template but depicted purely from a soldier’s eye view. The pitch is great, now how about the execution?

Alas Battle: Los Angeles either betrayed the limitations of its idea or, as I am more prone to believing, it was a fluffed opportunity. Having the film locked down purely to a grunt’s eye view was the single original idea present. It allows for a more immediate, engaging experience; there’s no cutting to scenes of the president in a war room, or to science geeks pouring over data – we’re with Sergeant Nantz (Aaron Eckhart, seriously slumming it for a blockbuster paycheque) and his unit, on the ground, on the front line, as the bullets and bombs fizz past their ears. Understanding their enemy is a luxury – achieving their objective and surviving is first and foremost.



Where Battle: Los Angeles ultimately failed for me was in the sheer lack of innovation. It works well in briskly introducing a bunch of characters and then swiftly getting the alien attack underway. Seen via news report footage on television (we never cut away from the soldier’s perspective, remember, and to the film’s credit it sticks to that principle) it generates plenty of action and momentum without actually getting our heroes up close with the E.T.s for quite some time; enough to generate anticipation. And dread. Because when the attack hits these aliens pack serious weaponry and devastating force – it doesn’t take long for L.A. to be bathed in smoke and fiery ruin.



All good so far, then. And when Eckhart and his men are informed that many other places have fallen even faster than L.A., and that the place represents the last military stronghold in the whole area, the sense of overwhelming odds is fantastic. They get in their choppers, they are whisked into the fray. Make no mistake, at this point the film had me: I was strapped in and ready for the action to kick off. And this, unfortunately, was where the film only served to disappoint.

It’s irritating when I consider that the movie could have had anything happen. From a script writing point of view our guys didn’t need to have to scope out a police building and then shepherd out the survivors (kid, woman, father – all needy boxes ticked) in the boring seen-it-all-before manner it did. Bad enough that the ensemble of characters all dropped out of a cookie-cutter military movie manual; from the soldier with a pregnant wife waiting at home to Michelle Rodriguez as a tough-as-any-man female soldier – you don’t meet any archetype here you haven’t seen elsewhere.



Aaron Eckhart’s troubled but capable Nantz has a murky past that is constantly alluded to but never properly explained. A more edgy film might have toyed with the notion that he wasn’t wholly stable or he housed deep flaws, but despite the rumours about how he was responsible for the deaths of soldiers there’s never a doubt that, whatever happened, there was surely nothing he could have done to prevent it. He’s a poster boy of virtuous bravery despite residing in morally dubious grey areas.

So we’ve got an uninspiring rescue-the-civilians plot being undertaken by caricature soldiers. The aliens, whilst certainly sporting impressive hardware, are also revealed to have physical weak spots (just to the side of where there heart is, FYI) and, wouldn’t you know it, also have a great big dumb Achilles heel for our heroes to discover and exploit. I won’t spoil it completely but anyone who saw Independence Day and the manner by which those aliens got taken out isn’t going to be awash with surprise here.



The vast lack of originality would have been quashed had the action been top notch, though. I mean I didn’t really go in expecting originality – the film had me on side because I wanted spectacle. However, whilst the jerky-cam in the thick of it sold the chaos it made it hard to know who was who (a lot of the time soldiers were shot and other soldiers weren’t and you just wait and see which of the vague cut-out characters you recognise either made it or didn’t – at no point does emotion get past the confusion). And a few decent sequences – one in a bus, the other on a bridge – offered sustained entertainment but otherwise nothing else will linger in the memory.

Battle: Los Angeles (the use of the colon there makes me think there’s an eye on franchise sequels; Battle: New York fills me with no excitement whatsoever, please don’t let it be so!) had one good idea it stuck with and saw through to completion – take the well-used cliché of an alien attack on earth and show it purely from a soldier’s perspective. Unfortunately the recent War Of The Worlds remake offered up a subjective perspective of the very same concept with far more finesse and invention than is presented here. It’s such a shame. I really wanted to be enthralled by this but, with such a by-the-numbers script, this was a movie that was fighting a losing battle to fulfil my expectations.