“This can’t be happening,” I said to myself as I winced at what was being shown on the big screen.
“This is awful,” my girlfriend said. “Can we just leave?”
“I wish, but I can’t. I have to write a review about this garbage, so I have to see how it pans out,” I said while massaging the bridge of my nose to alleviate myself of the slight headache Battle: Los Angeles was giving me.
Should I start this review with the boring, cliché plot that I pretty much foreboded down to the disastrous melodramatic scenes? Or should I unleash a full arsenal of sarcasm against the writers and actors with their corny one-liners and failed attempts at delivering a joke? Plot it is.
Set in present day, Earth is being invaded by aliens that at first seemed to be meteorites hitting the surface. The central location for this movie is obviously, Los Angeles, but it is clear to the audience that this is a world invasion. The aliens don’t even wait around to take in the scenery of the place they want to colonize, they pull a blitzkrieg and kill anything that moves or has a radio signal. That’s when the U.S. Marines step-in and all hell breaks loose. Not just the action though, but the vapid plot. And let me tell you, Battle: LA’s plot is duller than a cheap steak knife that was used numerous times in attempts to cut a brick.
The audience could clearly see where director Jonathan Liebesman was going with his plot. He should have traded in a little action for a bit more character development. The problem with that direction is that the characters are uninteresting and I could not careless what happened to them, so he feeds the audience more brainless action loaded with CGI. But that doesn’t even remedy because the aliens are nothing more than scrap metal with guns. It’s just not entertaining and with technology today, more is expected.
Take for example the 1996 film Independence Day that essentially had the same plot. That movie kept viewers in suspense because of the large spacecraft that hovered over earth landmarks; we didn’t know when a giant beam was coming down to annihilate everything. And the aliens had tentacles, large eyes and a scary face. It was futuristic. Granted, now it looks cheesy, however it still looks a lot better than Battle: LA.
Aaron Eckhart plays the tough marine with a dark past, Michelle Rodriguez, like all of her movies, plays the badass chick who can hang better than the roughest guys, and Ne-Yo, well, he plays some guy who wears glasses. Now that’s what I call character development.
Am I trashing this movie? Yes. Next question. Why? Because it sucks. The two positives I give this movie is that it shows the amount of teamwork I’m sure Marines display in real life action and how Liebesman used the camera at many times to give the movie a first person shooter effect, but play Call of Duty: Black Ops instead of watching this movie. Many might enjoy that instead.