Review of Battle: Los Angeles (2011) by Delta_Assault — 27 Sep 2011

This film was pitched to us as Black Hawk Down mixed with Independence Day, but a more apt description might be Black Hawk Down and District Nine, with a splash of Cloverfield. The aggressively handheld nature of the camera is an immediate callback to Cloverfield, while the situation of Marines fighting it out in a wartorn urban battlefield is exactly like BHD. District Nine's excellent visual realization of CGI extraterrestrials merged almost seamlessly with live action is repeated here, along with some rather gory dissection of said aliens.

Black Hawk Down's legacy is all over this film. While BHD was a masterpiece of a war film and Battle LA is not as good, there are a lot of borrowed elements. The epic visual of numerous helicopters flying in formation while the camera slowly pans around them worked wonderfully in Ridley Scott's film, and it does so again here. Also, there's a shot of a rocket flying through a window and exploding directly behind Michelle Rodriguez's character. Again, instant callback to BHD. The operatic action beats that BHD nailed so well are faithfully utilized by Jonathan Liebesman to deliver a satisfying and meaty action experience.

At first, you're just watching very blurry, dusty, murky... out of focus shots of the aliens, and you might start to worry and wonder and fret. I sure did. You're worried that they probably didn't have the budget to show the aliens in all their glory, and we'd just get quick glimpses of their features. Either the CGI technology wasn't good enough or convincing enough or they just couldn't afford to show it. Well, they quickly lay that fear to rest, because after the initial firefight, you do get to see the aliens in all their gooey, cybernetic glory. It feels like they learned from District Nine, with a mostly convincing and believable visual of CGI aliens fighting with real actors in a physical location. The film as a whole is not the thoughtful meditation that D9 was, but the borrowing of its impressive technical innovation is clearly on display.

I've mentioned Cloverfield, so we've gotta talk about the shaky cam. It's the most defining element of that film. How do they use it here? Well...the shaky cam does come on a bit strong. You need to strike a good balance, in order to capture that authentic in-the-moment experience, without overwhelming the audience with dizzying blurs that get annoying and nauseating. For the most part, the shaky cam makes sense, with the camera shaking around when the cameraman runs with the Marines to cover, or the jittering of a shaky chopper ride with turbulence. Those all make sense and the film gets better with it as it goes on.

However, the beginning of the film did annoy me with its shaky cam, simply because the scenes were all taking place before the invasion and there was no need for all the motion. Like, we're watching a scene of two guys talking in an office, with one of the guys telling the other that he's leaving the service. There's no need for that camera to wobble. Or watching a Marine walk toward a grave. Again, why is the camera wobbling so much? The cameraman is stationary, is he trembling for some reason? Are his nerves acting up? Does he have Parkinson's? It becomes distracting. Once the film moves past this prologue and gets right into the action, the shaky cam is mostly fine, except for the ride in the APC near the end of the film. At first I thought it was a Bradley, because they mentioned the Bushmaster 25mm chaingun, but it actually looks like a LAV, which makes sense as that's a Marine vehicle. That scene was in the dark and the cuts were so fast and shaky that you mostly just saw a lot of blurs and couldn't really tell what was happening. It really began to feel like some action scenes in Batman Begins. This is no good, when your audience notices that they aren't seeing enough and start to wonder exactly what's happening. That's when the shaky cam goes too far and fails as a visual technique.

An unavoidable aspect of the film that leaps to mind are the cliches. There are so many cliches in here, it's almost hard to count. Martinez, the hispanic Lt, says goodbye to his pregnant wife. Well, you know that guy's gonna die. Of course, he's a green Lt right out of school who doesn't have experience and requires the seasoned staff sergeant to help him out. There's a black marine with dorky glasses who's about to get married. Surprisingly, he doesn't die. The lines are pretty hilarious in how cliched and overused they are. Some examples like, "You are to kill anything that's not human!" and "That was some John Wayne **** you just pulled" and "Let it out. It's okay to cry. Your father was a brave man." I'm paraphrasing here from memory, so those lines may not be 100% accurate, but you get the general gist. It's a very well-trodden path here.