Review: Battle Los Angeles

The final 75 minutes of Battle: Los Angeles are some of the most action-packed in cinema’s history, providing the characters nary a spare moment to contemplate strategy or further flesh themselves out as human beings. The structure is run-shoot-repeat, making the usual video game comparisons downright inevitable. As such, the movie embodies the Bayesque trait that I hate the most about modern action pictures: the viewer never knows what’s actually going on, because the cuts are so frantic and all over the place, exuding the modern ideals of masculine entertainment and erotic chaos but not much else. It is completely un-cinematic.

For a moment, as a second-act action sequence became too poorly assembled for me to bear and I hid within the confines of my mind, I mused: well, isn’t this how things would really go down? If you were a Marine tasked to fight an inexplicable alien invasion–it has something to do with Earth’s water supply, the news coverage speculates–you would not actually have any downtime to decompress from the horror. Furthermore, as the movie’s handheld, rapid-cut style reflects, you probably would not have a clue as to what was going on around you. But then, as I focused back on the screen and lead actor Aaron Eckhart shouted out a grandiose line of dialogue in a ridiculous vocal tone akin to Christian Bale’s Batman crossed with a whisper, I realized: nothing else in the movie is realistic, so what kind of screwed-up justification am I forcing?

Before the relentless action starts, Battle: Los Angeles actually shows signs of promise, with a decent set-up by contemporary action standards. Critics will inevitably dismiss the opening as a military-recruitment commercial, but to such a dismissal I respond: so what? The film earns every one of its patriotic music cues and overt celebrations of military brotherhood by introducing sympathetic characters and defining the sense of community between them. We casually meet the ensemble over a day on Camp Pendleton, right before they are about to deploy into what is far more than the large-scale meteor shower initially reported. This sequence is not especially deep–only Eckhart’s Sgt. Michael Nantz, Lt. William Martinez (Ramon Rodriguez), and Cpl. Jason Lockett (Cory Hardrict) stand out as individuals–but it lays the exact kind of humanizing primer you want in a blockbuster.

That said, once the action begins, the movie itself quickly goes to hell in a hand-basket right with the characters. Abandoning every ounce of the emotional connection established in the opening, the non-stop explosions and even shakier cinematography take over. Certainly, teenage boys who have been conditioned to like this sort of film by the Michael Bays and Strause Brothers of the industry may enjoy Battle: Los Angeles. But would they not receive greater pleasure by actually playing a video game? Because watching the movie, which has little of its own to say, is just like watching friends hammer away at the XBOX while you’re left without a controller… and we all know how badly that sucks. For those who are not teenage boys, the constant sensory overload simply turns into a tiring, annoying blur — we get it: Nantz’ small group of Marines are all that is left to save humanity from complete alien takeover. How many times have we seen that before?

The film’s economy is certainly impressive, as it accomplishes blockbuster-level visual effects on a “mere” $70 million budget. (That is, except for the aliens themselves, which puzzlingly look like machines in the long shots and then slimy critters in the close-ups, but I suspect this is more a result of flawed character-design than CGI.) Then again, should I really be championing the fact that the film was able to look as good as every other soulless action tent-pole for half the price? Sure, this marks an admirable business feat, but it will also ensure profitability and therefore many more films like Battle: Los Angeles. What happened to films like Terminator, which saw their comparatively low budgets as a reason to invent new ways of filmmaking rather than to pinch pennies in order to imitate bigger blockbusters? Battle: Los Angeles doesn’t commit any sin that a Transformers picture hasn’t already, but its willingness to reinforce the brain-dead hegemony of Hollywood is, in effect, just as destructive.

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Battle: Los Angeles (2011, USA). Produced by Jeffrey Chernov, Samuel Dickerman, David Greenblatt, Ori Marmur, Neal H. Moritz, and Lisa Rodgers. Directed by Jonathan Liebesman. Written for the screen by Chris Bertolini. Starring Aaron Eckhart, Ramon Rodriguez, Cory Hardrict, Gino Anthony Pesi, Ne-Yo, James Hiroyuki Liao, Bridget Moynahan, Michael Peña, and Michelle Rodriguez. Distributed by Columbia Pictures. Rated PG-13, with a running time of 116 minutes.