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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
An ok alien movie with a few bright spots.
By Brian Nallick
I had read horrid things in regards to this movie.
The last “alien invades Earth” movie I watched was “Skyline” which was an sheer disaster.
I’m happy to report that “Battle” is superior in each way.
That’s not much of a compliment but it is something.
Here’s what I liked.
Passable story.
Decent acting.
Eckhart is genuinely the one to shine here.
The aliens are passable but not one thing actually new.
The score, pacing and direction are done well.
All the things that were just ok were also the films biggest problem.
It was so derivative it wasn’t even funny.
Here is my problem.
It’s been done before.
And not just once or twice, we’re talking hundreds of times.
….done so much better.
(Minor spoiler)
The movie opens with a literal bang.
My introductory thought was they’ll show a few minutes of violence then rewind to before the invasion with a nice shot of the city skyline with a lot of rock music playing in the background.
…….and that’s EXACTLY what happened.
It’s like the managers took EVERY bad cliché with regards to these kinds of movies and crammed them all into this one.
The characters were the usual cardboard cut outs that you won’t give a rip about.
The only thing to set this film apart from each other “alien invades Earth” movie is the fact that the film in truth concentrated on our military and thankfully left out the majority of corny civilian characters.
If you’re actually into this genre then I commend a rental.
Otherwise I’d say skip it.
At this point, for this film to work there has to be more than bland characters who appear to be sleepwalking through the movie.
When you may predict just regarding each scene, each piece of dialog and each explosion it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Sorry, not recommended.
13 of 18 persons found the following review helpful.
Battle: Los Angeles Awesome Movie
By CatDestroyer
I could not disagree more with the firstborn reviewer. I thought this movie was great! It is nice to watch a movie out of Hollywood where we people aren’t the bad guys demolishing our own planet. This was a good patriotic movie with less cursing then most; I highly commend it to anyone…unless you’re sleepy…
2 of 2 humans found the following review helpful.
A Much Better Movie than Detractors Say It Is
By Brian D
In terms of audience reaction to “Battle: Los Angeles,” I think it’s interesting to look at the breakdown of 5′s, 4′s, 3′s…etc.; at the time I wrote this there were more or less beneath 50 reviews, and it was the finish opposite of a “bell” curve. Most reviews were positive, with over half of the ratings in the 4 and 5 region. Then there were over a third of them in the 1 and 2 region…and only FOUR rated it in the middle, a 3. The audience either loved it or hated it, and…
I in truth enjoyed it myself.
I thought it had a nice, gritty approach, with the special importance and significance on a single platoon’s encounters with their part of alien invaders. Handheld cameras, soot, dirt, grainy shots, chaotic action…it seemed much more realistic than I was expecting. As one of the interviewed actors said, it was a war film that happened to have aliens in it.
When persons assert it was like “Independence Day” I have to disagree. Certainly there were similarities, but heck, they’re both alien invasion films. I thought it shared more samenesses with “District 9″ actually; both were similar in technical approaches (see the preceding paragraph), and both emphasized a plot that was with regards to a problem that also happened to include aliens….in “District 9″ the subject was immigration.
(And I think keeping “Independence Day” up as a bastion of All That Is Great in Sci-Fi is faulted, by the way. Really, think regarding it: closely any person aspect of that movie was pretty bad: the cliches ran overtime, what with Randy Quaid, and Judd Hirsch… and what when it comes to that ridiculous scene where Will Smith hijacks a helicopter to his old base, where his fiance just HAPPENS to be waiting WITH the President’s wife?)
I felt this movie did a fine occupation emphasizing the smaller, more personal distinct elements of battle, rather than the grand D-Day approach of thousands of men and dozens of personalitiies. While Aaron Eckart’s reputation (Sgt. Nantz) had a pretty timeworn problem–in that he was a warrior facing the end of his ‘useful’ days–I felt he did a terrific occupation of infusing the role with the hoorah! of the marine, and the characters serving beneath him came off as authentic as well. There were hardly any genuinely name actors in this film, and I think that made this more genuine, too.
The action was constant, from the moment the troop helicopter touched down in L.A. There was closely no let up, and I don’t need a spoiler warning to tell you that a good deal of the cast in the beginning of the movie isn’t around at the curtain call. And those that are around at the end look pretty beat up, scraped up, and worn…not like those old movies where John Wayne’s uniform wasn’t even dirty at the end of the movie.
Special effects were terrific, as one is coming to suppose nowadays, and the movie integrated a gorgeous solid alien enemy, keeping them concealed and mysterious for a good deal of the film, then letting us in on them bit by bit. One of the “meatier” moments involved probing an alien’s body in a scene that goes a good deal further than waterboarding, which I thought would receive at least a little more of a reaction from the general public–it was surely worse than anything Jack Bauer did in “24.” But I guess it’s one of those things that we would shout out in regards to were it an enemy soldier who likewise happened to be human.
Watch this film, and undertake to think of it in terms or what it is: a war film. I think you’ll like it….I surely did.
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