Battle LA Review
By J.p. Lawrence
When I was a young boy, I would play war with my toy soldiers, getting them into ridiculous, explosion-filled situations and then having them survive due to the grit of their heroism. Looking back, I feel those boyish fantasies made more sense and felt more original than the cliché-storm that is "Battle: Los Angeles."
The movie, pitched as a military movie that just happens to include aliens, is half video game and half recruiting ad for the Marines. Set in the titular Los Angeles (obviously), the premise of the movie is a worldwide alien invasion force happens to land right next to our heroes.
Conveniently, the aliens, despite their ability to traverse the galaxy, decide not to bomb us from space, because that would be too easy. They choose instead to engage us in urban warfare, which happens to be the one thing the United States military has been practicing for the past decade. Worse, the aliens decide to fight against an entire platoon of war movie clichés – they should have just given up once they saw Aaron Eckhart’s chin.
Eckhart, looking at times like a gritty MacGyver, plays our hero: the gruff veteran with a dark past, ever so close to retirement. The rest of the cast, too, comes right out of the war movie express kit: the inexperienced commander, newly married; the shell-shocked crazy guy; the baby-faced rookie; the foreign soldier angling for citizenship – even the spunky female soldier, played by Michelle Rodriguez, who played a spunky female soldier in both Avatar and Predators.
The plot would have made a great video game, since each new element is as simple as a checkpoint in Call of Duty: get to this place, rescue the civilians, escape to that place, investigate that mysterious signal, destroy this, destroy that, kill, kill, kill. The movie loves placing its characters in impossible positions and then killing off members of the platoon to show exactly how real this shit is.
However, this creates less of a feeling of suspense than a feeling of anticipation; with so many characters, the movie felt like a horror movie, as I eagerly waited to see who would die next.
Not content to rip off war and horror movies, the movie also delves into zombie clichés: a trip to the abandoned grocery store, ponderous debates about leaving party members behind, and completely unnecessary romantic tension mark the story. In addition, there’s an invasion of sci-fi tropes, including technologically advanced aliens after our resources, pushing Earth’s defenders into seemingly insurmountable odds. Luckily, Eckhart’s character is the modern-day reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes, so at no point should the viewer ever doubt that humankind will lose. (Spoiler: they don’t.)
And how much doubt can this PG-13, Pentagon-backed movie have about the superiority of the American Marine? This movie blows right past subliminal, or even liminal advertising for the military, instead opting for super-liminal with all-caps gusto. In fact, in what should be the emotional climax of the movie, Eckhart’s character consoles a grieving party member with, basically, a pitch to everyone in the audience to “Join the Marines! Now!”
As the credits rolled, I half-expected to see some heavy-chinned, big-bicep, gruff voiced Marine recruiter pop up from behind the screen, ready to offer me a life of adventure, camaraderie, and killing ambiguously water-based aliens.
That all the troops look the same, and that their back-stories are pretty much irrelevant, is par for the course for a military movie. We don’t care whether they live or die, because their worth to the audience rests in how much ass they kick or how and when they die.
In other words, the soldiers are endowed with about as much humanity as the aliens. For the audience, they are simply toy soldiers of an inferior quality, the kind you’d find in the discount aisle of grocery stores and truck stops – the home, incidentally, of DVDs of "Battle: LA" for years to come.