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Starring:
- Aaron Eckhart Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz
- Michelle Rodriguez as Techincal Sergeant Elena Santos
- Will Rothhaar as Corporal Lee Imlay
- Shaffer "Ne-Yo" Smith as Corporal Kevin Harris
- Michael Penya as Joe Rincon
- Ramon Rodriguez as 2nd Lieutenant William Martinez
Story: A Marine platoon faces off against an alien invasion in Los Angeles.
Trivia: Very little of the film was actually shot in Los Angeles. Tax incentives brought the production to Louisiana where sets of Los Angeles streets were constructed.
Battle: Los Angeles comes from director Jonathan Liebesman, who was behind the helm for such awful horror films as Darkness Falls and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. This action/sci-fi/war film is a little bigger in scope than anything he's worked with before, and when looking at his resume you wonder why someone relatively unproven would get the job. But Liebesman is the least of this film's problems, which keep it from being epic and instead just a run of the mill sci-fi movie that should quickly be forgotten.
Aaron Eckhart stars as Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz. He's retiring after losing all of his men in a previous mission. How or why is never explained, because this would provide drama about if he is fit to lead against the alien invaders. This film is too busy with special effects and explosions to build up any of their characters, which is fine in some cases but you need at least one strong character to gravitate towards or the audience stops caring. Eckhart's character is the only one with any kind of build, and it's mostly that he had a bad incident in his last mission, but he's going to be a hero now.
That's the problem in general. The script is really lacking. Nothing is explained, nothing is given any real time to develop. It's just set piece after set piece, action sequence after action sequence. Any time we may get some real character development that's moved aside for another alien attack. So outside of Eckhart, who someone manages to make his character watchable by sheer will alone, everyone else is mostly stock. You have your minorities, your token "tough woman" character and even a rookie that speaks like he's, yes, from the country. It's paint-by-numbers and incredibly lazy writing. Sure, the actors are decent in their roles, but they really don't have enough to do outside of fire a gun and yell a lot.
That's the biggest complaint with the entire script: lazy. The filmmakers put a lot of effort into the special effects (which were decent, but not as good as you'd expect) and the aliens (which look laughable) rather than focus on the human characters and the fight for survival. A sci-fi war movie is not hard to do. Even if it's not Aliens or Starship Troopers, you can still put something watchable together. Battle: Los Angeles is a mess. It's full of tired war cliches mixed with tired alien invasion cliches. The ending is ripping almost en masse from Independence Day.
There are no interesting characters, the plot itself is very basic and there is not a single interesting line of dialogue. I can guarantee you've heard many of the things these people will say from other, better films. If one were so inclined, you could probably predict what a character was going to say before they say it. That's if any of the side characters manage to get more than a line or two per scene. They're mostly there as cannon fodder so Aaron Eckhart's character can solve all of the problems and save the day. If you wanted to make it a "one man saves the world" picture, then do that. Don't put it in the disguise of a ensemble piece and then refuse to flesh out any of your main characters.
But this isn't the worst of it's genre. There are some good points. The combat scenes are fairly decent. This movie doesn't have the usual "blurred camera" cinematography on the fighting scenes that other films like Transformers and even The Dark Knight like to use. You can actually see a majority of what's going on, which is a plus. The aliens look bad, but their ships are unique. They're actually something of a callback to the old "flying saucers" days with some of the drone groups.
Battle: Los Angeles would make a great video game. I was thinking that as a bonus level of something like Call of Duty I could find myself really enjoying playing it. But even Call of Duty has a better written story and developed characters. For all of this movie's story, you might as well be playing Bad Dudes for the NES.
Source: IMDB
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Entertainment
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