Assassin 33 A.D.
Battle: Los Angeles is a loud, violent, incoherent mess with an insultingly hackneyed script. Its manufacture is a reflection of appalling cynicism on the part of its makers, who don’t even attempt to make it more than senseless chaos. 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.
Meteors fall to Earth near the coasts of the world’s major cities (and in Ireland’s Dingle Bay that meteor must have strayed off course). They contain alien troops, which march up from the beach with their weapons of war and attack mankind. No reason is given for this, although it’s mentioned they may want our water. We meet the members of Marine platoon 1-2-4, and its battle-scarred Staff Sgt. Nantz (Aaron Eckhart). They’re helicoptered into Santa Monica and apparently defeat the aliens. Since all of L.A. is frequently seen in flames, it’s not entirely clear how the Santa Monica action is crucial, but apparently it is.
The aliens are a triumph of imagination. Do they give Razzies for special effects? They seem to be animal/machine hybrids with automatic weapons growing from their arms, which must make it hard to change the baby. As Marines use their combat knives to carve into them, they find one layer after another of icky gelatinous pus-filled goo. Luckily, other aliens are mostly seen in long shot, where they look like stick figures whipped up by an apprentice animator.
Aaron Eckhart stars as Staff Sgt. Nantz, a 20-year veteran who has something shady in his record, which people keep referring to but screenwriter Christopher Bertolini is too coy to come right out and say what it was (never mind; he’s just the guy who wrote it). No matter. Eckhart is perfectly cast, and let the word go forth that he makes one hell of a great-looking action hero. He is also a fine actor, but acting skills are not required from anyone in this movie.
The dialogue mostly consists of barked or hissed military jargon: Watch it! Incoming! Move! Look out! Fire! Move! The only characters I remember having four sentences in a row are the anchors on cable news. Although the platoon includes the usual buffet of ethnicities, including Latinos, Asians and a Nigerian surgeon, none of them gets much more than a word or two in a row so as characters they’re all placeholders.
You should see the spaceships in this movie. It’s like some kind of tornado went through a junkyard and threw them together. They’re aggressively ugly and cluttered, as if design were unknown on their planet, and even their Coke bottles had to be made into pincushions. Though presumably these vessels have arrived inside the meteors, one of them shows an amazing versatility by tunneling up from the earth before our very eyes but how, you may ask, did it travel 10 or 12 blocks under Santa Monica undetected to the battle zone at Ocean and Fifth?
There is a visual style being employed in certain modern movies such as “Battle: Los Angeles” that I have begun to refer to as the BGS, or Blurry Gray Shape school of cinematography. I know that directors can shake things up with hand-held shots, but for scenes involving fast movement, don’t they have point-and-shoot settings that would keep things evened out? Here is my rule of thumb: If all the shots in your action sequence look equally good (a) in focus (b) on drugs and (c) edited with a Cuisinart, you are doing something wrong.
In a good movie and please don’t email me examples we always know where we are in relation to everything else. But take any 30 seconds of this film and describe where anything is in relation to anything else. Then consider that during those same 30 seconds three different kinds of blurriness will be going at various speeds from left to right or right to left across the screen.
Occasionally there will be close-ups of Aaron Eckhart or Michelle Rodriguez looking worried while other stuff appears to be happening elsewhere; not only are these inserts unrelated to anything else in the film but I get four emails every week from nice people who say “I’m worried about Aaron Eckhart because he looks so worried, do you think he’s worrying about something?” and I write back that as far as I know Mr. Eckhart is a very good actor and was probably just worrying about acting in this movie.
The film is two hours of continuously mounting intensity interrupted by occasional scenes of shrieking devastation punctuated by moments of complete silence because everybody’s dead. The sound effects appear to have been created by the same machine that, when stepped on, shoots out a flag saying “BANG!” Action movies like this are designed to appeal primarily to teenage boys from 12 to 48 years old. And teenagers aren’t much interested these days in action movies where everyone doesn’t either fly or look like a vampire.
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