Review: BATTLE LA - Soulless, Mechanical Exercise But Fleetingly Amusing

By Shaun Munro / July 1, 2011

rating: 2.5

Make no mistake; there is a reason why the promotional materials for Battle: Los Angeles kept the dialogue to a minimum and placed whizz-bang action at the forefront. This disappointingly generic alien invasion war film shirks a ripe premise in favour of inexperienced helmer Jonathan Liebesman's misguidedly overdirected aesthetic, meaning the film cannot even deliver on the meagre promise of technical proficiency. Taking place in present day as aliens begin to descend upon Earth and destroy the major cities, a final stand is being organised in Los Angeles. Marine Staff Sgt. Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart) leads an incredibly green platoon of grunts in the battle for Earth's natural resources - chiefly water - facing an enemy they could never have even imagined. If there were several things I expected Battle: Los Angeles to be, dull is certainly not one of them. Liebesman spends an inordinate amount of time building up characters who are essentially cardboard - the one with the chequered military record, the one with the fallen sibling, and the one with the pregnant wife back home - only for them to become faceless non-entities once the action starts. The only graces of character are given to those with the pretty faces and bankable names - that is, Eckhart's Nantz and Michelle Rodriguez's Sgt. Elena Santos - though not even in their cases does the film push the emotional or visceral buttons and make us want this platoon, or Earth, in fact, to survive. With all those juicy money shots in the trailer, though, it at least succeeds as a rock-em, sock-em action film, right? If Liebesman's goal was to immerse us in the milieu of war in a manner akin to Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, then he had positively failed; Spielberg always kept us aware of what was going on where and with whom, and more importantly, made us care about those in the brunt of the action. Here, hackneyed editing gives way to frustratingly incomprehensible action, in which spatial sense between the marines and the aliens is scarcely construed at best. In trying to create a tightly-knit, closed-in action film, he has crucially neglected much regard to scale and relativity; this a film sorely in need of a wider perspective, even if just now and then. Deciphering the action is more a task than an entertainment, in which clearly making out the organic-machine hybrid creatures is a supreme challenge, as the camera either doesn't keep still or insists on disguising them mostly beneath a surplus of grit and rubble. A subtle, slow reveal of the invading creature is fine, yet here, we never see enough of them in plain sight, and at some point, you really do have to play fair. Compounding these eminent issues is the curious amount of downtime between shootouts, in which little of meaningful consequence happens; a subplot with Michael Peña and his son is mild and woefully simplistic, while the countless allusions to Eckhart's bungled formed op rip all too enthusiastically out of the war film playbook. After initially confounding the expectation that it might be a thoughtfully-minded action film, Battle: Los Angeles is at least fleetingly amusing as what appears to closely resemble a parody of war films, ala Verhoeven's hilarious Starship Troopers. Rest assured, though, that irony is difficult to come by here, and prepare to be disappointed when you realise you're laughing at rather than with the rotely-dialogued characters. It's easy to feel bad for Aaron Eckhart, who gives a truly spirited performance as the only relatable human at the epicentre of the whole shebang; he barks orders with dogged conviction and his chiseled features lend themselves perfectly to the role of a seasoned, honourable marine. It's difficult to imagine that after ripping through such a substantial body of films as In the Company of Men, Thank You for Smoking, and The Dark Knight in the last decade-and-a-bit, that this meagre offering presented much of an opportunity to him besides a sizeable remuneration. At the end of the day, action films can be dumb and overblown and cheesy, but they must be fun. Battle: Los Angeles features probably more explosions than your average Michael Bay film, and just as much schmaltz as Roland Emmerich's Independence Day, but it lacks the former's proficiency and the latter's cheeky charm. In a word, it is a soulless, mechanical exercise that makes one helluva trailer, but evidently hasn't quite come together in the final cut. Despite plenty of promise, it's a mirthlessly clichéd, spasmodic mess of editing and direction. Still, look on the bright side; at least it wasn't released in 3D. Battle: LA was released in the U.K. and U.S. today.