Battle: Los Angeles

You’re setting yourself up for a fall when your alien invasion film is made by a production company called “Original Films”. I wouldn’t make mention of the fact if it wasn’t a hideously inappropriate name. With a script that plays out like a mechanistic recitation of every how-to-write-a-screenplay book and course foisted on the unwitting and ambitious, it’s a dire statement on the art of screenwriting. Seriously, we have just about every cliché you could imagine in here. Let’s run through some of the worst offenders: a “just about to retire” Staff Sergeant who is tormented by the memories of his last tour of duty in which all his men died; a fresh recruit who just happens to be the younger brother of one of those dead men; a soldier struggling to recover from shellshock and return to active duty; a lieutenant fresh out of officer training with no idea of what to do in a real battle. The film wastes a good ten to fifteen minutes awkwardly trying to get us to give a shit about these cardboard cutouts, while the audience is shouting “Get to the fucking monkey!” and drilling holes in their arms to numb the boredom.

But then the aliens invade to steal our water and there’s lots of shooty, shooty and things going boom while the cameraman intermittently has his testicles electrocuted by a director who thinks that spasming visuals somehow lend realism to a story about aliens invading. And funnily enough, all that crap you just sat through, the bit where it showed the nuance of a hormonal teenager in expressing his emotions, that’s all out the door. And that is, actually, as it should be. A bunch of trained soldiers shouldn’t be emoting in the middle of a combat situation. They should be doing what they’re trained to do and killing some aliens. And that’s where Battle: Los Angeles shines. Because despite the aforementioned shakycam, the combat is thrilling and intense, using sharp edits, thumping music and high volume explosions to get the blood pumping.

But then the fighting stops, and that awkward teen is suddenly trying to put his hand on your knee and it’s creepy rather than sweet because you know he has no soul and is only doing it because he thinks it’ll get you to ignore the vacant sweaty look in his eyes. Every attempt at some kind of emotional moment fails to connect, totally fails to make you give a toss and just annoys you when all you want to do is get back to the action. And you know that secretly that’s all this film wants to do too.  Battle: Los Angeles is a straight-up videogame shooter masquerading as something a little more. It shouldn’t have pretended, it shouldn’t have bothered with backstory that leads to nothing but a reviewer like me mocking it for failing so hard. Intriguingly, the videogame based on the film follows exactly the same plot and takes about an hour to play through. The film runs two hours. I wonder how much runtime would be lost if they’d cut the fat and stuck to what they’re good at?

But it’s not like it’s just the attempts at adding dimensionality to characters that are embarrassingly bad. There’s also the godawful solution to the invasion. An Achilles heel to the alien’s technological superiority that is so unbelievably stupid it’ll have you shaking your head in disbelief.

Battle: Los Angeles is big dumb fun and there’s no shame in that. Sadly, it’s a lot dumber than most and its facile attempts at depth make it a bit less fun. But if you want to spend two hours having your ears battered by the heavy bass of things going boom it is definitely the place to be.

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