Cinema 2011 #24: Battle Los Angeles

When watching Battle Los Angeles, an alien invasion action movie with volume cranked up to 11, a certain blink-and-you’ll-miss-it plot point left me feeling somewhat bemused. You see, it’s all about these meteors falling to Earth, without warning, conveniently avoiding all landmasses, yet belly flopping into the beautiful briny sea just off the coast of a number major cities around the world. These meteors turn out to be much meatier than expected, revealing a horde of alien invaders and cache of deadly weapons inside their cosmic cocoons. Suck it, San Francisco. You’re next, New York. Take that, Tokyo. Lie down, London. Die… Dingle. Yes, for some reason, one of these weaponised meteoroids comes crashing down in Fungie’s turf, presumably after their sat nav told them not to take that left turn in Albuquerque. How our Kerry neighbours fare is unfortunately not the path Battle LA chooses to follow, alas, but it’s safe to assume we all die.

However, in Southern California, in a city offering absolutely no strategic advantage to the militarised space invaders (they even get a couple of saucer-like air force ships, speeding across the sky to fast to shoot, worth their 300 point bounty), humanity makes its last stand.  Aaron Eckhart, whose jawline is aptly chiseled, leads the marine team, and while there are no busty civilian boffins, it is made up of every other cliché left in the book; a staff sergeant with a shady past two days from retirement, a by the book wizkid who’s never been in combat, a career-driven female who wasn’t going to have kids, but is now stuck with two sprogs who won't stop wailing, a shy southern virgin, and a sage Nigerian surgeon, who, when realising the peril he’s entered, quips, “Shit, I’d rather be in Afghanistan. “ You and me, both, my friend, you and me, both.

It almost feels like the whole thing is a poorly veiled metaphor for the indiscriminate carnage and scares of the shock and awe invasion of an underequipped city by a fiercely aggressive, better trained agitator, whose weapons and technical capabilities far outweigh those of the people their slaying without mercy nor reason. Why are they invading, one of the multi-ethnic marines ponders? For our water the crusty, and bearded obviously, science-man offers on the news. Despite the fact that Los Angeles and its hinterlands have been experiencing droughts since the 1930s, with some of the worst in recent years.

Anyway, to cut a longwinded 116-minute story short, the team needs to get to a police station where some civvies are stranded. To do so, they end up in a number of skirmishes with the aliens – who look like a poorly rendered CGI cross between old skool Cylons, Big Mac himself and Alpha 5, Zordon’s bitch, and wield weapons that look like arm-mounted hybrids of Roman Candles/Repeaters, Sparklers and Fun Snaps – and pick up the helpless survivors along the way. Patriotism plays centre stage, and characters you neither care about nor whose names you could even recall get blown up. While there is an initial sense of pace and grittiness to the battles, their editing is so scattershot it’s hard to tell what’s happening, and every character, barring Eckhart’s GI Joe and the kiddies, is entirely expendable in combat death scenes lasting half a second. 

It just doesn’t work, even if you are willing to overlook the cliché-ridden plot and subtext. While it’s action packed and very very loud, there’s just not enough bang for its buck.

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