battle: los angeles

Now here's a difficult review.

I'd heard that Battle: Los Angeles was an awful film.  And it is.  But I actually kinda enjoyed it.

One of the clichés of Hollywood is that when they pitch movies, they do so by going "it's x meets y".  So, for example, a film might be "top gun meets love actually" or whatever.

Well, battle is basically that - it's Independence Day meets Black Hawk Down.  Well, there are other elements in there, like Civilians, but that's basically it - aliens invade and we follow some regular marines who end up essentially surrounded and besieged on all sides.

So it's not particularly imaginative as a concept, but it's also very poorly written in practice.

The problem is that it's crammed so full of clichés it almost groans with them.  If you've seen lots of war films then you can just about predict what is going to happen in any given scene and what the people are going to say.  It's so bad it somehow contrives to make you actively disinterested in the characters where it's trying to make you care for them.

It's also odd how it's playing out a kind of mini version of independence day.  So where the idea of that film was that it was a deliberately over-the-top and big budget alien invasion B movie, here they've taken the same basic plot and scaled it back, but kept the enormous budget.  So instead of stepping back to a proper B movie you end up with a big movie with a terrible script and hackneyed plot.

Even the thing that's meant to be something different - the fact it's filmed hand-held - I've seen dozens of time before.  In fact isn't nearly every war film since Private Ryan filmed like that?  It's almost become a cliché (who'd have thunk it?).

It's also weirdly jingoistic (as in "America - Fuck Yeah!"), but it's a jingo-ism directed against aliens who we learn so little about that we can't hate them.  It's like it's trying to make you hate the aliens because they're not the stars of the film, rather than giving any particular reason for them to be considered "bad".

Okay, there's some voice-over bits that imply they're here purely to wipe us out in order to grab our water, but why?  I'd have loved it if the film had pulled the rug out from underneath itself by suddenly revealing at the end that in orbit was a ship full of women and children aliens who were all dying of thirst.  But it's not that clever a film.

Indeed, it manages to come up with some intriguing concepts for the aliens - the foot soldiers have weapons bonded to them and they look like they might be cyborgs.  Their air power is central controlled using drones - but why is that?  Can the foot soldiers not be trusted with ait power?

Certainly you end up with a weird contradiction that this appears to be an alien race geared for intergalactic pillaging and war with super powerful weapons, yet the foot soldiers are generally poor shots and seem very poorly organised, given that central control idea.

And yet despite all of the above, I actually secretly kinda enjoyed the film.

I think what probably happened was that there was so much action and it was so well done and I was just in the right frame of mind for a dumb action film that I ended up enjoying it from a pure spectacle point of view.

I certainly don't think it's a good film.