With Battle: Los Angeles screenwriter Christopher Bertolini (The General’s Daughter) and director Jonathan Liebesman (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) have created a video game of a war film by mashing together Black Hawk Down and District 9 with an invasion to match War of the Worlds. Does that mean it’s good? I enjoyed it for what it was, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it good.
This film can’t match the intensity of Black Hawk Down despite trying to be as chaotic and fast paced. It doesn’t delve into the politics or morals of District 9 even though desperately clinging to the idea of what it means to be human. And it doesn’t reach the scope of War of the Worlds as it turns into another film hell bent on destroying and saving Los Angeles as the rest of the world waits in ruin for the City of Angels to save itself.
The first 15 minutes are about as lazily cliche as they come as we’re introduced to the group of marines that will guide us through the 90 minutes that are to follow. One is retiring from the Marines after 20 years of service, another is about to get married, another has a pregnant wife, another just lost his brother in combat, another has a sister in Nigeria and another appears to be suffering from some sort of PTSD. Shortly after the pieces are placed on the board and the game begins.
Meteors begin falling from the sky. Aliens emerge from the ocean and begin annihilating those sunbathing on the beach. The military has declared “Threatcon Delta” as Los Angeles is turned into a war zone. Rubble rains down on the greying and smokey landscape. Battle: Los Angeles is a sea of concrete, explosions and gunfire. The action is fast, furious and increasingly numbing.
Don’t expect to find character attachment or much of a story outside of the idea the world is under attack and a team of soldiers are the last defense against it. The comparison to today’s video games is an easy one, just think “Call of Duty” meets “Gears of War”.
Is all of this a bad thing? For many, maybe. For me it served as a satisfying diversion. Looking back at the three comparisons I made above, I can’t exactly find much reason to return to watch Black Hawk Down, District 9 or War of the Worlds all that often, but they were all three satisfying features the first time through. The same can be said for Battle: Los Angeles, it’s just a matter of knowing what you’re going into. The trailers, for example, are a good start.
Explosions occur. Loud noises. Gunfire. Aliens and destruction. As opposed to a first person cam, Liebesman flips it around and gives us a gun barrel cam aimed back at a soldier as he scans for an extraterrestrial in his midst. The rest is filled with handheld camerawork as shaky as we’ve seen in most actioners since Paul Greengrass and Oliver Wood popularized it in 2004 with The Bourne Supremacy. Of course, the subtlety Greengrass and Wood employed is absent here and cinematographer Lukas Ettlin even gets a bit melodramatic with his movements.
From a filmmaking perspective, none of the camerawork really impressed me. What did impress me was the sound design, which was truly top notch and the one thing that stood out in the trailers. The acting? Well, there are actors involved but acting is secondary here as the story moves from one destructive set piece to another with an eye on how to destroy everything in sight before moving to the next location.
On top of the comparisons I’ve made, I don’t think a comparison to Michael Bay’s Transformers is out of the question. Battle: Los Angeles is a more enjoyable film, but it is just as destructive, loud and senseless. The difference, I would say, is the action in Battle: Los Angeles forwards the film’s momentum whereas the action in Transformers is a distraction from the film’s lack of momentum.
It’s hard to say if this is a film that deserves your money. Either a viewing at home or one in a theater will likely cause the same reaction, and I have a feeling if you’re reading this review you’re likely to see it now or later so why not give it a spin in theaters? Just try and find one with the best sound system and you should be golden.
