Battle: Los Angeles

I believe that within Battle: LA there resides the seed of a powerful idea: The mix of realism and aliens. The enforced perspective of the military platoon; The audience only possessing the information the characters have access to as they trek into an occupied suburb of the city of angels. The juxtaposition of the familiar realism of the military machine and the utterly unknown alien aggressor concucts a particulary potent brew that I really felt was going places.

(It's probably important to note here the difference between realistic and realism. "Realistic" is when something portrayed is a good representation of the reality while "realism" is simply the appearance of such. It's a language of techniques and cues that we associate with realistic yet doesn't require reality. There's a straightforward metric for determining which term is applicable to Battle. If it were realistic, there would be fewer aliens.)

So, about half an hour in I'm beginning to wonder why this film has had such poor reviews. Sure, the cast is an assembly of character types found in any number of military movies (The leader is straight out of the academy, his second command is one day away from retiring and Michelle Rodriguez arrives playing the same character Michelle Rodriguez always plays) but such caricatures are often useful and mean the film can (or rather could and should) skip the introductions and get right to the shooty bits. But beyond this it carries the seed I mentioned above with a reasonable amount of poise and precision. The global ramifications are barely touched upon, instead focusing on the immediate. It was an intriguing and largely unconventional business.

Then, tragically we roll into act two and the movie takes it's heady concepts and precedes to beat them about the head with every trope it can lay it's greasy, fat, stupid fingers on. The problems become astounding clear. Our green commander cracks under the pressure. Soon-to-be-married guy buys it early. Children are introduced for emotional leverage, patriotic speeches are made and gosh darn it they go out there and win one for the god damn Gipper.

Michelle Rodriguez happens to be some sort of Intelligence tech and helpfully knows all there is to know about the aliens and their operation. The sense of perspective is steadily worn away as the conduct a full blown sociological survey between bursts of fire. And as they gleefully erode the alien they make sure to kick the realism for good measure.

Our band of fragile and fallible marines are rapidly transformed in the forge of combat into a superhuman fighting force and the villain decay occurs at unprecedented speed. The aliens begin the film as a nigh insurmountable threat, leveling all before them. Unkillable and omnipresent. By the end, five dudes assault the mothership on foot. Surrounded by legions of troops and an armada of craft they take on all comers and succeed, saving the entire planet from destruction and suffering a single casualty for their trouble.

What begins as a supernatural Black Hawk Down decends into a grubby and pretentious Independence Day. A clumsy mess of a movie composed from lumps of better films packed roughly around a concept that deserved far more.