Battle: Los Angeles

Cafe Society
61

Sorry about the Zombie thread, but this isn’t worth a new thread.

I set my DVR to record this movie on Starz last week on a whim and wasn’t expecting much. I remember seeing the ads last year and not really being that excited by this movie. I think at least part of that ambivalence was from the similarity to the obviously horrible Skyline. I finally got around to watching it tonight when the SNF game turned into a blowout. I must say, I really enjoyed it.

Like was noted, this is a war movie. That it involves aliens in incidental. It’s a heck of a lot more similar to Blackhawk Down than it is ID4 or District 9. It’s not sci-fi and it’s not a monster movie. It’s a really good war movie once you accept it as that, cliched in a lot of ways of course but guess what, so was Saving Private Ryan and Platoon.

The battle sequences were surprisingly good. There was a little bit of the stormtrooper thing where the bad guys can’t shoot straight, especially at the end when there weren’t any expendable red shirts left in the plot, but all in all it had a enjoyable amount of realism mixed with shit blowing up.

The script did a pretty good job of conveying the tactics and leaps of logic that led to the eventual victory without breaking my suspension of disbelief. The radio signals giving them away was a plausible deduction. The stuff with the water was pretty thin, as noted early in the thread, but I agree that it seemed like it was artificially tacked on in post. You’ll note that none of the characters ever say anything about it, it’s only ever communicated in voice over and a cut away to a news broadcast. It’s very likely something that was added late in the process as a response to focus grouping. I got over it.

I think the discussed cliche with the central command center it acceptable. Modern militaries are moving to unmanned aircraft, drones and robotics today. In some far off time people will be largely removed from the act of fighting here on earth if the process continues. That a alien power would have made the same advances is very logical if they have any sense of compassion or value life. We equate the preservation of life with evolution and civilization, why wouldn’t they. I think that a interstellar military force very possibly might be a fleet of unmanned robots and such a force might require a central command post if communicating more remotely over interstellar distances is inefficient.

Anyways, I liked the movie a lot. Perfect Sunday night fluff. The shakey-cam isn’t as much of an issue in a living room as it is in a theater.

62

I forgot to mention how much I liked the ending. Usually the finish ends with some idiotically heroic move where someone single-handedly saves the day. That wasn’t there. Sneaking in and lasing a target for artillery is a pretty realistic scenario here. There wasn’t some silly kamikaze run where an improvised explosive sets off a chain reaction. There wasn’t a lucky shot. And there wasn’t a victory over overwhelming odds. That the last battle simply amounted to them having to keep a laser trained on a target for 3 minutes seems uncommonly common for a action flick. Also, that the bad guys used the drones to block the attacking missiles was a nice subtle and unexpected touch. You’d expect that kind of improvisation from the good guys in these types of movies.

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I mentioned this movie in another thread about ‘Movies you thought would suck but didn’t’ or words to that effect. I liked it more than Avatar, mostly because I couldn’t help but root for the humans and not the stupid blue Keebler elves and there magical treehouse. As I said there, yeah the dialog seems clichéd but somehow I think that real soldiers in combat would probably say very clichéd things. And shaky-cam has never bothered me. For a film like this it really works. Kind of reminded me of the new Battlestar Galactica, the way their use of shaky CGI gun camera footage worked well.

If you haven’t already, read Ebert’s review of this movie. Really goes overboard, to the point of actually saying that if you liked Battle: Los Angeles you’re an idiot and your girlfriend should dump you!

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I’ve heard that watching this movie is a lot like watching someone else play a war video game. I saw it and for the most part, I agree, but I thought it was a pretty cool looking video game so I liked it anyway. After all I’d heard about it, I wasn’t expecting much and was surprised at how much I liked it, actually.

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Random question: how much did the water level drop? I’m going to calc the scale of tanks they’d need.

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Glad I’m not alone. :slight_smile:

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Another compliment for the movie after sleeping on it. The scene where Eckhart’s character captures a alien/clone/battle drone/conscript/whatever and methodically goes about trying to kill it in an effort to locate it’s weak spot was fantastic. This is the type of thing that most people complain about in alien movies and it’s exactly the type of thing that you’d expect a smart soldier to do. There wasn’t any glowing magical power source, there wasn’t any silly pacifist human arguing against the cruelty of it, it was just a organ that was located in the center of mass that killed it. Perfect.

Also, the throw away line where they explain that the weapons were grafted onto their bodies neatly did away with the trope where soldiers never pick up and try and use the superior alien weapons.

I think the movie deserves a lot of credit for the alien/war movie cliches it avoided as opposed to the criticism for the ones that it used.

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It was a fine little war movie that happened to involve aliens.

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Wow… you guys should check out the Joe Haldeman books The Forever War and Forever Peace. Before we get started, the latter is not the sequel to the former (that book is entitled Forever Free), however crazy that may sound.

Omniscient nails it in one! That’s exactly what I thought when I saw it!

In Forever Peace, the American soldiers are fighting against guerilla insurgents in South America. The insurgents are largely 20th-century militia - little better than armed rabble - while the First World nations employ Soldierboys: robotic humanoid combat machines that are controlled remotely by an operator who is connected cybernetically to his assigned Soldierboy. The operators are relatively safe, hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the fighting…

… or so they think, until an elite commando team makes their way onto an American military base in Central America and massacres several operators while they are “jacked in” and unable to defend themselves in person. Sure, the commandoes are then slaughtered by the local security forces, but by then, the damage had been done.If I were religious, I’d pray that they never adapt Forever Peace into a movie starring L.L. Cool Jay and named Soldierboyz. Please don’t let it happen!

As envisioned by Marvano, our invasion fleet in The Forever War had ships that looked just like the American space shuttle, and tracked vehicles that looked something like 20th-century APC’s. I wasn’t too put off by that. The troops are armed with lasers, but the air support are drone craft firing conventional rockets and missiles.

The little green men might think it pretty sinister if they knew the truth…

The millennia-spanning war in The Forever War was initially the result of a misunderstanding. Humanity concluded that the Taurans must have attacked and destroyed one of our colony ships after it emerged from a collapsar and exploded. The truth is more that Earth’s military wanted a war to fight to get the entire human race behind a single cause, thus galvanizing both our politics and economy. The destruction of the colony ship was really just an accident!

Well, in The Forever War, we do have powered armor, lasers, and shoulder-launched tactical nuclear weapons, and the Taurans do eventually figure out how to fight back, including firing pellets at our space cruisers that wreak unbelievable havoc due to their high velocity, but…

[spoiler]Humanity develops a tool for the infantry called a stasis field. A squad of men move it onto the battlefield and activate it, creating a large dome of zero energy. Anything not protected by a special coating (the human power suits and the stasis generator, of course, are protected) immediately freezes to absolute zero, resulting in the death of anything living inside.

This works great against the Taurans, who suffer total losses in engagements in which they encounter humans equipped with stasis fields several times.

… until they figure it out, and the next battle sees a squad of Taurans armed with swords and spears enter the stasis field in their own protective suits, kill the operators with their primitive weapons, and turn the stasis field off. After that point, no team of stasis field operators is allowed to go into battle without their own primitive weapons to defend themselves.

In the final battle of the book, the hero’s unit bravely defends themselves with swords, bows, and shields against a Tauran force of unknown size, while waiting out their opponents from the “safety” of their stasis field. This turns out to be the last battle of the war.[/spoiler]

I heard a similar complaint about Suckerpunch. Still love the hell out of that movie, though.

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Exactly!

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It gave me a headache and made me angry, so I turned it off only 20 minutes in. Gung-ho American bullshit.

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:rolleyes:

Yeah, because only America was invaded…

You give me a headache.

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Or look at the European efforts at invading Africa - postponed by centuries due to diseases that killed the technologically superior invaders in droves.

“Beware and take heed of the Bight of Benin. Where few come out but many go in”.

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I had high hopes of watching it, and was chuffed to death when it appeared on one of my vid channels.

It was the biggest load of tripe I have ever attempted to watch.

I realise there is a cult of people who watch really bad films so that they can talk about them afterwards and make themselves feel intellectually superior for spotting the rubbish.

Sorry mateys it was shit, and I’m already intellectually superioriorioriorior, plus incredibly good lookiing, and a total sex machine, so I don’t have to watch this shit to make me feel good about myself.

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It’s called Battle Los Angeles, for pity’s sake. But that’s not my point - it was all this “Marines are tough guy heroes that never take shit from anything” that really just gets on my nerves after a short while. Seriously, if you’re not into that kind of machismo crap, it can get very irritating very quickly. No other country’s movies portray their military like that.

All that and nausea-inducing shakycam throughout. Ugh.

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That’s their problem then. But I think you’re wrong about that. I am sure that other countries portray elite military units that way as well. At any rate, the marines in this movie weren’t portrayed as all BEING that way anyway, they were shown as aspiring to be that way, to live up to the ideal of the Marines. And really, when your world is being invaded by aliens and you have no choice but to fight or die, what is the DOWNSIDE to being heroic?
Sounds to me as if you already had your mind made up before a single frame of film was viewed.

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Agreed. The first 20 minutes feature a old veteran unable to keep up with young soldiers. Him wanting to retire. A pair of friends shopping for wedding flowers. A soldier in a PTSD evaluation. Some meteors entering the atmosphere. A young lieutenant warning a older sergeant that he didn’t want any insubordination. And that’s about it. Aside from the fact that it tries to make soldiers sympathetic and human and is set in the US there’s nothing remotely jingoistic about it.

Sounds to me like Guanolad are seeing what he wants to see and is just vomiting anti-American bias by reflex. If you hate war movies fine, and think every soldier is a mouth breather fine, but that’s your issue. It’s not inherent in the movie.

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Let me reiterate, I only saw the first 20 minutes. Any character development after that is not something I will be witnessing, because it gave me a headache and have consigned the movie into neverwhere.

I admit I am slightly biased because I am already preconditioned to dislike that nonsense, as anyone is for something they don’t like. But I don’t see why I’m being singled out; it’s a legitimate reason to not enjoy a form of entertainment.

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:confused:

You’re being singled out because you’re the one who made the quoted statement? You think that may have something to do with it? :wink:

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Lots of people have said many statements, they weren’t singled out. My reason for disliking the movie is seemingly taken personally, presumably by pro-Marine types. I wasn’t even being anti-America as accused, I was anti-typical-musclehead-portrayal-of-the-military.