Review of Battle: Los Angeles (2011) by The D — 22 May 2013

(4/10).

Battle: Los Angeles is a sci-fi alien invasion action movie starring Aaron Eckhart and Michelle Rodriguez. These movies are usually hit or miss for me, but I always try and go in with an open mind because there are some terrific movies in the same genre. District 9 is a prime example of this because that movie's incredible. This movie was fairly underwhelming for me and is completely forgettable. The movie does have some really tense action scenes and some impressive visuals, but that's about all I can say for this movie. Intense action and cool visuals are all somebody might want in this type of movie and that's okay, but I still felt disappointed because it had the potential to be so much more than a typical action movie.

The main problems with this movie lie with the characters, plot and script. The characters are completely 1-dimensional cardboard cutouts and you don't care about and have no emotional attachment to. It's as if all these characters were very cliched secondary characters from other generic military movies and were just plucked from those movies and put into this one. It's actually challenging to remember the names of the characters throughout the movie. The second biggest problem is the plot. Here's the plot in a nutshell: Aliens attack Los Angeles, a group of military personnel go and fight them. That is literally the entire plot of the movie, I'm not joking. It really is that simple and generic. Thirdly, the script has the characters shouting cliched military movie dialogue such as "Where the hell's our back-up?!" and other stupid lines like that. Some of the shaky-cam can also get really annoying in this movie because the director uses a ton of it.

Overall, This was kind of a disappointment for me because I am a fan of alien invasion movies when they're done right and this one just wasn't a good movie. Aside from a few intense action sequences and some impressive visuals, the movie doesn't really have much to offer that we haven't seen before in other, better movies.