Alien invasion film has surprisingly few chuckles

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This article was published 11/03/2011 (5689 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TAKE Independence Day and Skyline or pretty much any aliens-invade-L.A. thriller. Strip it of Will Smith and any one-liners the heroes might snap off upon killing an alien. What you’ve got is Battle: Los Angeles, a straight-no-chaser war movie where the enemy is extraterrestrial.

It’s a house-to-house, street by street infantry combat movie in the modern video game mould — smoke, laser blasts, explosions, fleeting glimpses of the foe and chance encounters with civilians. Remember, you lose points for shooting civilians. This isn’t Libya, for Pete’s sake.

Meteors are splashing into the world’s oceans, the cable news folks tell us. But what they’re not telling us is what the military knows: “They’re slowing down before impact.”

Armored warriors storm the beach at Santa Monica and the marines scramble to get civilians out of a free-fire zone along the coast, territory they plan to bomb to stop the invasion.

Aaron Eckhart is the staff sergeant with a troubled past, a guy who is about to get out of the Marine Corps, suddenly hurled back into combat. Ramon Rodriguez plays his lieutenant and Ne-Yo, Noel Fisher, James Hiroyuki Liao and others make up the squad that sets off into the No Man’s Land of Santa Monica to face off with an utterly unknown foe.

Jonathan Liebesman, the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, nicely handles the early scenes, shooting the confused soldiers’ point of view with a shaky hand-held camera and lots of fog. The lightning-quick enemy troopers don’t seem all that bothered by bullets. The whole “You kill anything that is not human” ethos and esprit de corps of the Corps (their unit slogan is “Retreat? HELL”) is straight out of 100 other combat films. That’s not a knock, but this isn’t a movie that stands up to a lot of pondering.

The squad reaches a police station where a few civilians (Michael Pena and Bridget Moynahan) are holed up, and they all try to figure out how to get out of the to-be-bombed zone and how these space invaders might be killed. Let’s dissect one. And when you’re doing a live alien autopsy, it helps to have a veterinarian around.

The aliens seem like preliminary sketches of the revoltingly real critters of District 9. The locations are almost convincing as corners of that filmed-to-death metropolis, Los Angeles (they shot most of it in Louisiana).

It’s a film of noble sacrifice and “good deaths” but surprisingly few chuckles. A medic mutters “I’d rather be in Afghanistan.” That’s what passes for foxhole humour here.

But as corny and predictable as it sometimes seems, this Battle works on a visceral level, playing out like a video game that’s got you hooked. Eckhart stoically anchors the picture and tough-as-nails Michelle Rodriguez shows up just in time to give it a testosterone boost.

It’s not new, it’s not novel and it’s not art. But as a popcorn movie a couple of months out of summer season, Battle: Los Angeles will have to do.

— The Orlando Sentinel

Movie Review

Battle: Los Angeles

Starring Aaron Eckhart and Michelle Rodriguez

Grant Park, Kildonan Place, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne

14A

2 stars out of 5

Other Voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Battle: Los Angeles.

A summer popcorn movie for the spring, this hybrid of a tale blends together elements and characters from numerous sci-fi, thriller, actioner, and combat-war films, all placed in one package that aims at mass entertainment.

— Emanuel Levy, emanuellevy.com

War of the Worlds meets The Hurt Locker in director Jonathan Liebesman’s down-and-dirty alien-invasion flick.

— Alan Jones, Radio Times

Not a single arresting image is found amid the sci-fi rubble, though unintentional laughs eventually arrive.

— Nick Schrager, Village Voice

The deadening and sometimes laughable litany of shouted military-style dialogue eventually pummels into submission any hope for fresh creative angles on this well-worn format.

— Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter

Here’s a science-fiction film that’s an insult to the words “science” and “fiction,” and the hyphen in between them. You want to cut it up to clean under your fingernails.

— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

— Compiled by Postmedia News