Battle Los Angeles is a bad movie. Not just bad, but sickening to the stomach and to the ears. Battle LA is almost bad for almost every reason that can be made about a bad movie you see.
If there is any movie coming out and there is one movie you want to see to avoid the ridiculous trend of Twilight copycats, you'll find Battle LA on the list. Battle Los Angeles doesn't help at all and is almost the brain-slaughtering adult male equivalent to those copycats.
Battle LA currently stands down to as one of the "greatest films reviewed" by Roger Ebert who called this film stupid and it is.
There is no bit of a plot that you could comprehend, however from the trailer and the movie itself there is an outline: a meteor shower hits Los Angeles revealed as these aliens and a military unit led by a retiring seargeant (Aaron Eckhart) is sent to the area to bring them down.
I must admit that I had expectations for this film. And after spending two hours of gobble gobble, first-player shooter styled scenes and being emotionally manipulated of close ups to several cast members, I just watched the film for nothing.
Director Jonathon Liesbesman had came out with this idea and having to become "inspired" from other war and sci-fi movies to this film, he then said this is mostly original. Why does this director whose resume included The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and many other slasher flicks hired himself to make this piece of crap.
Liesbesman takes the hand-held camera to the most excruciating and sickening extreme. I usually don't care about how the camera usually moves in a movie, but while watching, I had to get out of the theatre three times because I thought I would be puking my head off. It's lazily edited (to be fair, there was no such thing as an editor in here) and every technical quality including sound, special effects, art direction and cinematography is lame. I mean there is nothing visually stimulating or redeeming about this film.
Performances from the cast are either uninspiring or unconvincing as many of the actors go running around like a scared-to-shit civillian. This includes Aaron Eckhart, who by all means, a good actor but what can he do with this kind of script that puts him into a stereotype that is overly used. I had seen one of the most sentimental acting from kids where their role is to scream and cry. Come on. It's just pure exploitation of these young ones.
The screenplay goes on around many cliches to cliches where a soldier commands his overused commands like 'Let's go' and 'get down' along with a dying soldier's last words. There's retiring seargeant, soldier with preganant fiance, wimpy soldier, and such stereotypes to be found.
Personally, I love science fiction. It's one my all time favourite movie genre and I really love to watch an alien invasion movie. I like it more as the average geek. But Battle backstabs the genre by doing two things.
1) It rips off so many alien invasion movies like Cloverfield, District 9, Independence Day, Children Of Men, Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan (both of which are only war films).
2) As a science fiction flick and like almost every film, it should have at least one concept in its mind. This doesn't know what it is and when it is known, the film leaves it all behind.
As film fans, every film should know what's the genre intended, what it wants to be and most importantly how much deep imagination does it have.
Had the movie been in 3D as planned, this movie would have gave out my first F. Sony is planning a lawsuit against the makers of Skyline for ripping off their movie. Skyline may have been so bad, but it may add to that quote with "it's good".
This review serves a warning to 16 year olds who want to serve their cinematic appetite: Battle's junk food. And like all kinds of junk foods, they're unhealthy and rot your brain.
I almost want to walk out of this film very much. But I didn't. Battle Los Angeles is an awful film that absolutely made me felt cheated. It may be one of the countless contenders for worst movie of 2011.
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