I liked it more than I thought I would. Yes, it hits nearly every war movie cliche but I thought it was well done and exciting. A few observations:
I just read Roger Ebert’s review and someone must have pissed in his Cornflakes that morning because the film really doesn’t deserve the bile he heeps on it.
The recent movie Skyline, which is similar, made me want to punch something, it was so bad. This was entertaining and well made.
Apparently if a movie needs to have a chick fire a gun, she has to be played by Michelle Rodriguez. It’s the law.
I agree this was much better than I thought it’d be. It’s a hell of alot better than Skyline. As far as the alien invasion genre goes I felt this did a good job at coming off “realistic”, though I wish they didn’t confirm “they’re here for our water” onscreen like that. That was the only thing that really took me out of it.
That bugged the crap out of me. It’s completely stupid, and what makes it even more stupid is that the line was completely unnecessary. They’re invading, just leave it at that. It’s *really *stupid to say that the ocean levels had already dropped in just a few hours.
The rest of the movie was fairly well done. Shit got blowed up real good. I choose to believe that the whole bit about them invading us for our water was just the media (in the movie) being completely wrong. I’d like to think that a few minutes later scores of scientists called up the TV station to tell them how wrong they were.
I intended to see this movie today but it was sold out so I watched the Adjustment Hat Guys instead. Debating on whether to try again tomorrow. Does it have anything going for it other than stuff blowing up? With the current horrific mess in Japan I don’t know how enjoyable I would find watching massive destruction.
Didn’t really like it, and I was really excited to see it. On the other hand, I got to see my old office building get blown up (I used to work downtown), so that was quite interesting.
Just not enough alien plotline creepiness for me, it was basically a war movie involving aliens. I felt like checking my email halfway through the movie.
Interestingly, there is a new original movie on SyFy tonight called “Battle of Los Angeles.” The descriptive blurb sounds a LOT like this movie. It stars Nia Peeples. Haven’t seen her for awhile!
Well, I got back from seeing it and I loved it. It wasn’t perfect and I could tell you from the beginning who was going to die, but despite its flaws I was on the edge of my seat.
This was not exactly Roger Ebert’s favorite film. His review alone is scathing enough to set fire to Los Angeles.
He went even further on his new PBS show “At The Movies” - calling it the worst film of the year, or worst of many years…
Oops - I see the OP referenced Roger’s review - but here it is in case anyone wants to read it. It is quite funny in his bile, so you might enjoy it just to watch his head implode.
I didn’t like it at all. I have to agree with the critics–it’s just a string of war movie cliches with aliens pasted in. The entire movie was filmed in shaky-cam, it seemed even worse than Cloverfield to me.
I thought it was decent, but uneven. The handheld stuff, especially at the beginning, was really awful - usually I’m not bothered but it went too far. It does get a little better later.
All the characters were so utterly lame and cliched that I actually fell asleep in one slow part. There’s one character who doesn’t even have a real name because it’s obvious he’s going to die:
“Hector’s father” - yes, he’s Mr. Rincon, but even after he dies he still gets named after his son. Also, anyone think the “Do you need anything? My son can help.” came off really awkwardly?
The plot starts out pretty decently but gets worse over time, eventually becoming rather similar to
Independence Day
at the end. Most of the time, what you expect to happen will happen.
That said, the battles were for the most part really well done. The one in the middle is actually better than the “climactic” one at the end. I actually wished it had been more of a pseudo-doc from a military point of view. (Cloverfield wasn’t a bad idea, just poorly executed). The problem was that most of what we got was a video-game style of army, on both sides. There’s even a quick reference to Resistance : Fall of Man (blink and you’ll miss it on a billboard near the freeway).
It was better than I expected it to be. I wouldn’t seek it out, but there are worse things you can do with your time.
If you ignore the underlying stupid it was resonably well put together (though at times it felt like everybody’d died a few times over).
(Movie alien cliche checklist: They attack with individual soldiers instead of just dropping rocks on us from space, they have a single point of failure, they apparently didn’t hold anything in reserve and/or came alone, they came for our water. At least it didnt’ turn out that they’re allergic to carbon and are shocked to discover we have it just lying around like dirt.)
No, they just have to come up with a reason why the aliens can’t or won’t just bombard us from space (or at least not give any reason at all so the viewer can fanwank something).
Independence Day was a somewhat reasonable compromise in that the aliens didn’t attack from space but at least they didn’t use infantry to fight block by block.
I saw this movie yesterday. Liked it, didn’t expect much coming in and was pleasantly surprised.
I HATED Skyline, oh god, that was an utter waste of time.
BLA was entertaining if you take it at face value and didn’t try to dissect it. It’s alien schlock, lots of things blow up, there’s a lot of cliche military characters, and you see some weird alien goo. Good enough for me!
This movie made me appreciate the value of a name actor a lot. Skyline had a bad script, but the actors were just soooo unbelievable and their dialogue seems so forced. It’s not just a bad script, but the presentation. BLA at least had Aaron Eckhart and Michelle Rodriguez, two actors you could recognize and can give good performances. Their characters felt more real than anything I saw in Skyline. It was really jarring to realize the gulf between a bad actor and a good one
