BATTLE: LOS ANGELES

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BATTLE: LOS ANGELES

January 2nd 2012 03:11

Category: Videos

The time is now, the place Los Angeles, California; the home of Hollywood, six foot tall blondes that grow on trees, ultra exclusive boutiques, the Hollywood Bowl and countless other icons of US culture. However as events unfold it seems that his is not a celebration of all that is fantastic and great about LA but rather a massive attack on the city by forces as yet unidentified, and LA is not the only city that is being attacked. It seems all across the world simultaneously major coastal cities are being attacked by an as yet unknown force – what on earth is going on then? Welcome to Battle Los Angeles, the latest incarnation in Hollywoods efforts to deliver a sci fi blockbuster use the good old alien invasion plot. Yep aliens, those forces who are attacking all those major coastal cities across the globe are in fact aliens – extraterrestrials and they’re sure as heck not interested in borrowing some change to phone home…

It would be safe to say that in terms of modern science fiction the old alien invasion shtick is about a century old, being first (as far as I can recall) used successfully by H G Wells in his seminal work War of the Worlds, an interesting account of just what would happen if for example Martians invaded England and how the might of the British Empire would cope. If anything Wells work paints a very bleak picture as it seems that the might of Old Blighty is no match for the superior technology of the sinister Martians with their war machines, heat rays and other fiendish devices. In fact at the end of the day it’s a blunder by the Martians that results in their demise, they end up dying from the flu due to their having failed to take into account terrestrial diseases.
That kind of ending seems highly unlikely in an American made film, especially where the United States Marine Corps (USMC) is involved. Although when the dust finally settled after all the action I realised that this movie’s plot and ideas were all over the place like a mad woman’s shit. The key thing that makes a movie is a story and just how well that story is carried and developed over the course of the watching of said movie can determine whether a movie is good, great or just goddamned awful or something that should be banished to the dungeon dimensions never to see the light of day. Battle Los Angeles falls into the just goddamned awful – its bad but not so bad that it needs to be sealed away like hazardous waste or forbidden knowledge…

In terms of the smoke and mirrors that are the mainstay of blockbuster sci fi flicks Battle LA ticks all the right boxes, it has sinister looking aliens with weird weapons it has loads of things exploding, it also has a semi dead alien which is used to provide an impromptu enemy anatomy lesson. It has moments of bonding, moments of pathos and scenes of what some would say are gut wrenching terror. It even has a troubled, haunted protagonist in the guise of Staff Sergeant Nantz ably played by Aaron Eckhart. So well does Eckhart play his role that you could quite easily believe that he is Staff Sergeant Nantz, that this character is very much a real man who has literally gone to hell and back and is suffering the effects. For most of the film I found that it was his acting that was heroically trying not only to hold his team and himself together but this slipshod plot that is gradually unravelling as the minutes tick by. Sadly though even though he is heroically able to deal a blow against the aliens he can’t do anything about the story…but superb acting nonetheless.
Somehow when this film was in its initial stages I can imagine it being pitched along these lines…aliens hit LA from the beaches they want our water and gain ground quickly but then in come the USMC and booyah they get their asses kicked. There is no way in hell you can convince me that there was any more thought than that went into this sorry excuse for a story. Let’s look at the premise…aliens attack Earth for water? Why – apparently we have the only free standing vast amounts of water in the known universe. So they can’t convert frozen water, aliens who can fly across the vast interstellar distances and they can’t say convert cometary ice into the water they need? Or even attempt to harvest water from Europa which even though it has a frozen surface it actually has an ocean beneath its icy surface?
Even if we ignore these points and buy into the premise then we have to look at the methodology employed by these water hungry aliens. They are capable of travelling vast distances, let’s face they aren’t local they would have had to have come from another star system and as the nearest star is Proxima Centauri which is 4.22 light years away – that’s a fair distance. Their invasion sneaks in without being detected until its effectively underway, thus demonstrating that their technology is far superior in terms of evading detection and they then proceed to attack all major coastal cities in order to seize the valued water. Again why? Why bother launching mass attack waves on cities that aren’t major water sources? If I was the alien’s generalissimo I’d just melt the polar icecaps and let the sudden rise in water levels do most of the work for me or if that wasn’t possible just establish a major presence in major water bodies and nuke a few major capitals to demonstrate that the waters of Earth now belonged to me and my minions. Attempt to dislodge us would meet with nuclear annihilation…
Of course though this kind of strategy wouldn’t make for a ‘good’ movie, so instead the aliens follow the path of falling into plot contrivance. Their motives and strategy are implausible because at the end of the day they’re only there to get shot up by the marines and in some cases irate US citizens. In essence they don’t even rate as antagonists, they’re just targets whose role is to be shot. Somehow this seems to be indicative of the makers of this film – they haven’t really created a film but just a larger than life version of one of the countless battlefield simulation games that are available for consoles or pc’s the world over. And if you don’t find the aliens motives or strategies out of line then we have to question the marines resourcing and objectives.
Sent out into hostile territory to a police station in West LA to rescue civilians who are in the zone that is about to be flattened by the US Air Force do they go in some kind of vehicle? Do they have a Humvee or even a truck or LAV? No they are to perform this task on foot. And then when they do get to the station they discover that they have to find a vehicle in order to evac the civilians – why didn’t they bring one with them in the first freaking place? After watching this film I was reminded of a line my father is sometimes fond of using whenever confronted with an appalling film, “the only good thing about that movie was the credits”.

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