BATTLE: LOS ANGELES Reviews Are A Critics Mauling!

The warning signs for Battle: Los Angeles were there for us when Sony made the unprecedented decision to not screen the movie for U.K. blogs in an attempt to avoid the critics mauling they must have known was coming. A heavy U.S. embargo has just been lifted on the movie (notice - just hours before it opens tomorrow) and the backlash against Battle: LA is thunderous and defeaning. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert has given the movie half a star (!);

"Battle: Los Angeles" is noisy, violent, ugly and stupid. Its manufacture is a reflection of appalling cynicism on the part of its makers, who don't even try to make it more than senseless chaos. Here's a science-fiction film that's an insult to the words "science" and "fiction," and the hyphen in between them. You want to cut it up to clean under your fingernails.

Ebert goes on to suggest the guys behind Battle: LA should get a razzie for lame special effects, especially of the alien creature design. He ends his review in a way only Ebert could;

Generations of filmmakers devoted their lives to perfecting techniques that a director like Jonathan Liebesman is either ignorant of, or indifferent to. Yet he is given millions of dollars to produce this assault on the attention span of a generation. Young men: If you attend this crap with friends who admire it, tactfully inform them they are idiots. Young women: If your date likes this movie, tell him you've been thinking it over, and you think you should consider spending some time apart.

The Playlist carry the ball rolling in their review, giving the movie an 'F' grade and proclaiming;

Film is dead. If we allow €œBattle: Los Angeles€ to survive beyond Monday, when its box office receipts will give the film the illusion of meaning, then we can say goodbye to the art form. If people find something worth saluting in this cynical, soulless, pointless waste of celluloid, then appreciation of the craft has dwindled to a point that would make Pauline Kael turn over in her grave, that would make Godard defecate stones, that would make Eisenstein commit seppuku. It is a film of no value, or no politics, seemingly churned out by a Hollywood machine dedicated to providing audiences with the dullest, least-offensive version of what people perceive as entertainment today: the disposable, empty wasteland where the morally bankrupt create junk that flatters the ignorant and alienates the informed.

Reviewer Gabe Toro goes on to talk about "indistinguishable action figures as characters" and that "Battle: Los Angeles may be the most expensive, and dumbest, military commercial ever made". No wonder Sony didn't want us reviewing it then.... At the time of writing, the movie is scoring 37% rotten on RT, though I would expect after the U.K. critics have chimed in and the wider sphere, it might be down to single figures by the end of the weekend. There's only just over a dozen reviews on there right now... Apart from a few visual delights, Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter hated it too;

Director Jonathan Liebesman (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) must have thought that shooting the whole film from a shaky, constantly readjusting camera perspective would give it the immediacy of you-are-there documentary coverage; instead, it makes it look like an affected TV show, provoking the nagging urge to fast-forward through all the speeches to get to the good parts. The cliches are so abundant in the script by Chris Bertolini (The General's Daughter) and the rah-rah stuff is delivered with such straight faces that, with just a slight adjustment in tone, Battle Los Angeles (the title of which features no punctuation onscreen) could stand as an effective parody of alien visitation pictures. If Mystery Science Theater 3000 was still around, the gang would want to put this one in its sights pronto.

Jeff Wells says these kind of hypercut, shaky-cam actioners should have been retired years ago;

Jonathan Leibesman's Battle LA (Sony, 3.11) is the work of a moderately talented, second-rate whore with really fast hands... What you get with this damn thing is Black Hawk Down meets District 9 meets War of the Worlds, and without a single fresh element or character turn or rooting element that doesn't feel like it was cooked up by a roomful of soulless, heavily caffeinated 30something screenwriters, and is therefore choked with cliches about brave sweaty guys up against really tough odds that you can see coming a mile off.

Emmanuel Levy didn't like it either, also citing it's cynical nature;

everything and anything goes in the name of coldly calculated, undemanding mass entertainment that might function as guilty pleasure for viewers. As written (or rather compiled) by Chris Bertolini, this high-concept movie€”call it alien invasion flick€”is a hybrid of various genres, shamelessly borrowing elements from numerous pictures, including €œIndependence Day,€ €œStarship Troopers,€ €œCloverfield,€ €œ2012,€ and even €œBlack Hawk Down,€ and then throwing them together into some kind of a hodge-podge narrative.

Worryingly he foreshadows... "if €œBattle: Los Angeles€ makes a lot of money (which I think it would), expect more movies of its kind coming soon to a theater next you". More reviews will be updated here...