Battle: Los Angeles (2011)

User Review

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  TheMovieDiorama

  3 / 10

  Battle: Los Angeles explosively bursts with monotonous war clichés and mind-numbing action sequences. Another year, another obligatory mediocre war blockbuster with the inclusion of A-listers in a bid to make money. Surprisingly I can survive the mediocrity embedded in those films...this however is a different story. Earth is attacked by extraterrestrials in which we follow a group of marines who are tasked in securing Los Angeles, which coincidentally hosts the control tower for the alien drones. In a modern day situation like this, you have to think to yourself "why didn't they just nuke the city and be done with it?". I wish they did, I wouldn't have had to sit through this long overdrawn soulless mess. The struggle was real as I battled myself to not fall asleep watching this snooze inducing catastrophe. Eckhart does his best to lead a mediocre supporting cast, I can see him trying so damn hard! But then his squad talk and it all goes terribly wrong. A horrific screenplay consisting of numerous plot details, no characterisation and a forced patriotic tone that comes across as cheesy. The amount of self-sacrificing and "I'm doing this alone" babble is enough to make those aliens retreat and find another planet to reap resources from. I feel nothing for this squad, they are just a means for shooting bullets at the enemy. I honestly didn't care who won, whether it was the dull humans of the blandly designed aliens. Any attempt of character development was forced and felt artificial. The narrative structure followed a simple iteration: blah blah, "we are marines, we are meant for this!", pew pew, "tell my wife I love her!", explosion...and it repeats those steps for the entire two hour runtime. I guess the drone ships were interesting atleast, and who would've thought that Ne-Yo would be one of the better actors! Yet the unmemorable action sequences were plagued with constant zoom ins, shaky cam and quick cuts to which I could not see anything amid the chaos. The whole film is just so loud that I became immune! Battle: Los Boredom more like.

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