Battle: Los Angeles Review – Callin’ out the Haters!

Halo: The Movie will never be made. And even if it is, you can guarantee it will be about as far off the mark as a sniper with parkinsons. 

But if a director ever musters up the testicular fortitude to try, I strongly recommend that they watch Battle: Los Angeles first, and take some serious notes. Why? Because here we have an example of a near perfect action/invasion/sci-fi movie for our generation of virtual gun-maniacs.

 

And I mean this in the nicest possible way; Johnathan Liebesman has merged Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Halo 1-3 in the most seamless and gritty way possible. For the first time this year, I have watched a movie that I sincerely hope gets the sequel treatment. But more on that later.

The Good

I’d like to start off by outlining the movies strong points. And, in my opinion, there are many of them.

The story of Battle LA is a simple one. I can sum it up in one sentence, “Meteors- wait, no ALIENS, hoo-rah!” You can piece the rest together yourself. While some may consider this simplistic and unimaginative, I found the straightforwardness refreshing. The movie opens with AaronEckhart’s character (who I will call ‘Sergeant Maincharacter’) finally resigning from the U.S. Army. But, oh wait, meteors are landing off the coast of each major city!

And this leads me neatly on to why the straightforwardness was so good: it was very quickly established and understood that these were aliens. After one typical “Like..you mean…from outer space or something?” comment, everyone pretty much knew what they were fighting against, and just got on with it. Which was great to see.

One of the things I really loved about the movie as a whole was the feeling of it being a fair fight. The aliens were not ridiculously advanced, with lasers and force-fields and all the other sci-fi clichés. They were bullet firing, rocket launching, armour wearing soldiers much like us. This added to the overall immersion and believability, and made it feel like a battle rather than just an invasion.

That brings me to the next good thing about this movie: the action. The action sequences in this movie were pretty much all phenomenal, the director was not shy about giving the audience full exposure to scenes of the aliens and the humans. But the movie is edited in a way that reminded me much of Cloverfield; you always feel like whatever you see, you are seeing it from the soldiers perspective. This is why I say that a Halo movie could take a big lesson from this picture.

One other strength of Battle: LA is the sound editing. It really reminded me of Battlefield Bad Company 2 in the way it really makes the audience feel like they are in a war-zone. One of the criticisms that the movie has received comes with the following quote : “noisy, violent, ugly and stupid.” This statement strikes me as the kind of thing that an angry and out-of-touch dad would make when walking in on his son playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I think that if you are of the internet and gaming generation, you will appreciate the tone of the movie and find the experience immersive. If you are a fan of Pride and Prejudice…well…you probably shouldn’t have watched this movie in the first place. No offence, Roger Ebert, but pipe down.

The special effects were more than adequate; at no point was the illusion under any threat. The creatures were believable, and there weaponry and vehicles were well imagined and flawlessly brought to life in a way that felt gritty and tangible.

I only spotted one scientific inaccuracy (which is remarkable in comparison to other sci-fi movies). This was the opening where the asteroids were suddenly spotted by NASA four hours before hitting the atmosphere. This is not a problem, as likely the Aliens would have used superluminal travel to get here. What is a problem is that NASA used the Hubble telescope to ‘scan’ the asteroids – it takes NASA days to re-orient Hubble, there’s virtually no way that they could ‘scan’ an asteroid cluster within 4 hours.

The  Bad

Of course this movie is far from perfect. And while most of the criticism being levelled at it is focused on the cynical nature of the plot, I think there are some more glaringly obvious points of contention.

Criticism 1 has to be Michelle Rodriguez. I don’t have a problem with her, it’s just that I’m sick of seeing the same character over and over and over again. It’s like the director said, “Oh, and we need a strong female character.” “Oh, you mean Michelle Rodriguez?” “Yes.” Absolutely zero imagination or creativity applied here.

Sgt Maincharacter

The other issue I had was the clichéd cheesy speeches. “TODAY- IS OUR INDEPENDENCE DAY!” Wait, no, that’s a different movie. Well, in my defence, there were about 5 speeches virtually identical to that classic, each time with ‘emotional’ music playing to a sombre drum-roll in the background. Yawn. You tell ‘em, Sgt Maincharacter!

My other gripe was how inept the main characters were in the first half of the movie. They spend a good 20 minutes stumbling around the streets of LA yelling at each other, constantly giving their position away to aliens. This results in a string of irritating ambushes that would have been avoided by anyone who’s played even one team death-match on Call of Duty.

 

The Verdict

This movie is the best sci-fi of 2011 so far by a country mile. I can even see a future for sequels, perhaps set at the same time as Battle : LA, but showing the battles that took place in other locations. "Battle: London" or "Battle: New York".

It is way better than Skyline, and caters perfectly to our generation. It does not deserve the criticism it is receiving.

7/10