Jonathan Liebesman’s Battle: Los Angeles is one of those rare films that fails on just about every level a film can fail on. The story, screenplay, cinematography, and editing are all done in such an incompetent manner that you begin to wonder why this film was ever made, and who in their right mind would give these filmmakers $100 million dollars to put together something this disastrously bad.
The story is one that we’ve seen a million times before (and is one that we’re sure to see another million times later). A mysterious and sudden meteor shower comes to Earth and ends up falling near several major cities around the globe. A group of Marines, led by SSgt. Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart), is called in to help evacuate citizens in Los Angeles just in case something goes wrong, but the meteor shower turns out to be something else entirely.
It is quickly discovered that the meteors are actually invading aliens who set out to attack all of the major cities that they have landed near. They are on Earth for the same purpose that they usually are in films like this. They simply want to take our resources, but more specifically, these aliens are here for the water, which they use to power their ships. Nantz and his troops are sent on a mission to rescue stranded civilians, but they very soon find out that they are the city’s last hope for survival.
The plot itself is one of the film’s biggest problems, not only for the fact that it’s one we’ve already seen, but also for the fact that there isn’t much of one to begin with. The film begins with about 20 minutes of pointless character introductions, giving us their names on the screen and about 30 seconds to get to know them before they are rushed into LA to carry out their mission. This becomes laughable as they never develop in the least, so by missing their chance to do this at the beginning, we never end up caring about which ones get shot or blown up later on.
The whole production makes it seem as though no thought went into any aspect of the film. The first close-up of one of the aliens in armor that we get to see makes it look as though they are wearing pots and pans, but thanks to a constantly shaking camera, we never really get to see much of anything. Later on, when we get to see what they look like without their armor, they look like the standard bugs that we’ve seen in other alien invasion films.
This quickly makes you realize that the filmmakers did as little work as possible and instead depended entirely on clichés to carry their film. From the beats of the story to the flat characters, we’ve seen it all before. They could have at least decided to give us something that would allow us to get attached to these characters, but instead, the last 90 minutes of the film is filled with enough explosions and gunfire to make Michael Bay blush.
These guys obviously didn’t learn anything from the other recent, and badly done, alien invasion film “Skyline.” If they would’ve simply watched that, they would have learned that a basic premise plus lots of explosions doesn’t add up to an entire film. At least “Skyline” had had the courtesy to be pretty short. “Battle: Los Angeles” runs nearly two whole agonizing hours.
It’s such a shame to see someone like Aaron Eckhart go from great films like The Dark Knight and Rabbit Hole to doing trash like this. Particularly in Rabbit Hole, he showed that he is a great actor and is not someone to be wasted in a role like this, one that requires no acting experience whatsoever. My guess is that he didn’t even get to read the screenplay before hand, most likely because there never was a screenplay. The dialogue and actions seem like they were made up on the spot, so what most likely happened was that someone summarized the film in a couple of sentences to Eckhart, getting him to sign on by making it sound like fun. Eckhart had to find out the hard way what the film was really going to be. This is, of course, speculation. I would just hate to hear that he knowingly signed up for something this obviously bad.
What we end up with is an extremely forgettable film and the frontrunner for worst picture of 2011, but it’s early yet, so anything’s still possible, though without anymore Saw films, it’ll take something very special to beat it. The only real saving grace that it had was that it was unintentionally funny at some points, such as when Eckhart’s character is giving a motivational speech to his troops about how they need to keep fighting and so on and so forth. This merely ends up being another check on the cliché list and another strong desire to leave the theater and rewatch Independence Day, which, when compared with this film, looks like a masterpiece. 1/4 stars.
Opens today in theaters everywhere.
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