Battle: Los Angeles

[Foxbat]

here are some clips:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1810119633/video/23814473/20110111/150/23814473-700-flash-s.120027644-,23814473-1000-flash-s.120027645-,23814473-700-wmv-s.120027646-,23814473-1000-wmv-s.120027647-,23814473-300-flash-s.120027640-,23814474-6800-qtv-s.120027649-,23814474-10300-qtv-s.120027651-,23814474-2700-qtv-s.120027648-

Any thoughts, good or bad?

[GrahamKennedy]

I've long wanted to see a really DECENT alien invasion flick.

War of the Worlds teased me, but gave me a story about a guy and his kids instead.
Skyline promised so much, but then turned out to be shit on a stick.

Please please please let this be it...

[Deepcrush]

Oh, oh God... I'm happy now?

[Tsukiyumi]

Looks like it could be it, GK.

Was that Aaron Eckhart?

[Tyyr]

Oh please let this not suck.

[SolkaTruesilver]

Let's cross fingers. It doesn't look bad, and apparently, the director tried to do more of a "war movie with opponents who happens to be aliens" rather than a "alien invasion movie".

so maybe we got a chance.

..

..

That the movie happens to be good. Not that humanity survives in the movie.

[kostmayer]

The trailers can be downloaded from HDTrailers.net.

I'm much agreed about the need fora decent alien movie.

[SomosFuga]

What about a decent alien tv series? we have "Falling Skies" coming soon.
You can check the web comics here http://www.tnt.tv/series/fallingskies/webcomic/?oid=74248

[Mikey]

What about a decent alien tv series? we have "Falling Skies" coming soon.
You can check the web comics here http://www.tnt.tv/series/fallingskies/webcomic/?oid=74248

We've got one - it's called "V," on ABC.

[SomosFuga]

granted

[Tyyr]

Going to see this tomorrow after work.

[Varthikes]

I just got back from seeing it.

Not bad at all. Nice characterization, solid storyline, and, from what I could tell, reasonable tactics from both sides of the battle. I'm also glad that they pointed out the battles were taking place all over the world, but the writer merely focused on the action in LA.

[Tyyr]

Short story, a well done movie. Not really all that innovative but it grabbed the story and made it its own.

[Tyyr]

I guess we'll take this chronologically.

Spoiler:

We're introduced to Staff Sgt. Nantz. Pretty stock character really. He's at the apex of his career and looking at a future behind a desk or in some non-descript job doing a lot of nothing. The younger generation is leaving him in the dust so he decides to retire. He'll finish out training the class he's with and leave.

We also get a semi-montage of various members of the platoon in question. There's the guy about to get married and his buddy, the nervous virgin (who joined at 17), the just married with a baby on the way Lt. right out of training, the medic, etc. Oh, and this platoon is racially diverse, really really racially diverse. Name a minority, they've got one. It's stock soldier stuff really but its done in such a way that the important marines get their moment, get established and you lock them in. Normally in a movie like this with everyone wearing the same thing and only their soon to be grime encrusted faces the only thing showing it's easy to lose track of who's who. Not here. With good visual touches (Glasses, a 'porn stache, paint under the eyes, etc.) and this early set up you remember the marines even if you don't know their names. It makes the loss of some of them mean a lot more.

However this opening is fifteen minutes tops. They're not screwing around. The aliens arrive and no one is surprised they're aliens. What about that? People aren't totally stupid... yet. No, because of the speed they approach at and their slight course changes humanity figures out they're not natural pretty quick. When they enter the atmosphere we know they're machines. Based off the landing pattern, right off the coast of every major coastal city, they figure it's an invasion. I'm not kidding, before the first alien even tromps up out of the surf the humans had already figured out we were being invaded. Go us.

So the attack begins live on CNN. On a strangely populated beach (seriously full of sunbathers like the military wasn't evacuating everyone and as far as the civvies knew dozens of meteors were about to hit) a reporter watches the ships "land". Cue a mini-tsunami swamping everyone and then the dying starts. The alien foot soldiers come stomping up out of the water and just begin hosing everyone with machine guns and rockets. It's surprisingly stunning as the aliens make no attempt to discriminate, if you're human they kill you.

The platoon arrives at the front lines (Lincoln street) but Nantz and the Lt. are given an assignment to move into the lost portion of the city (Santa Monica) to a police station that was overrun but apparently still has some civilians present. The trick, in three hours the airforce is going to level the entirety of Santa Monica. The colonel in charge states that the aliens are a completely ground based infantry force and so the airpower will teach them who they are dealing with. As you can see the military has grabbed the idiot ball for all their worth.

Let's get serious here, these guys are capable of travel between stars. They have undoubtedly done some recon and know that we have aircraft and will have some means of countering them. They are more technologically advanced than we are. Are you shitting me? You just assume since the first wave on shore are infantry that's all they've got? On top of that they delay the attack three hours. I don't know why. First rule of defending an invasion, stop it cold ASAP. You drive the invader back into the ocean and overrun their landing zone as quickly as possible. You can say they are looking for civilians but in a battalion wide briefing Nantz's squad is the only one that get's sent after civilians. When traveling through the city the civvies from the police station are the only ones you ever see alive. Long story short, why are you holding off a potentially game winning move for three hours? Because of five civilians? Really? Bomb the fucks.

So Nantz and company are off to rescue these civilians. This is a rather chilling period of the film as the troops move into Santa Monica. First they deal with hordes of refugees streaming past but then they get into the contested zone. It is a charnel house. I don't think even a single shot in the entire sequence DIDN'T feature at least three or four dead civilians strewn about. In keeping with it's PG-13 rating though the civilians were still intact instead of the more realistic alternative, ludicours gibs.

First alien contact was done well as the squad gets ambushed. The aliens are actually pretty good soldiers with hand signals and good tactics being shown all around. Naturally the Lt. right out of officer school freezes up but in an aversion of the usual Nantz doesn't have to get him to snap out of it. One of the other soldiers finds a way out and the Lt. immediately starts moving everyone out. The whole scene was shot PoV so if you don't like shaky cam syndrome you're not going to like this. It does give a very good feel of the ambush from the point of view of a man on the ground in it. The aliens are not well seen its confused, people get seperated. It's a well done scene I think.

After that things calm down slightly. The lost people are found, they meet up with another squad of troops (including Michelle Rodriguez) and eventually find the police station. It was overrun but there is a man and a woman and three kids. Nantz gives the Lt. a pep talk but it deviates from the norm. It's not the usual, "you'll lose men but you'll do fine. Your training will tell you what to do, I know you'll make the right decision speech." Instead Nantz tells him that everyone screws up and sometimes there is no good decision to the important point is to make a decision. Don't sit there pissing yourself, any decision is better than none at all.

With the civvies found they call in evac. The first evac chopper arrives (a Huey? This is a DoD sponsored thing, where are the fucking Blackhawks?) but can only take the casualties so they head out. If you've watched the trailers you know what happens next. BOOM the alien airforce makes its appearence and blows the chopper to shit. Everyone freaks and gets inside. They get word that no evac is coming for them, the aliens are blowing everything out of the sky. Through the magic of a functioning TV (amazingly enough with both power and reception) we find out that the aliens are not just attacking, they are wiping people out. Civilians that aren't killed in the attack are being rounded up, lined up, and shot.

They start looking for a way to move the civilians and because of the time eaten up by getting bushwhacked by aliens all the time they now have only a bit more than an hour to move six miles through contested territory. Nantz wants to run as best they can, attracting less attention, but the Lt. decides to use a hotwired bus. Nantz points out that it'll be a big target. At this point Nantz's earlier pep talk is in full force. While the movie doesn't make a big thing about it neither option is a good one. If they walk they'll never get out in time and have to pray they can find cover from the air strike. If they take the bus they are a big rolling target but they can get out. Since its the Lt.'s decision they take the bus.

At this point the aliens start to advance again and push towards the building leaving them with little time to retrieve the bus and get out. In the rush to get organized, get the bus there, and survive through it all someone finds an alien body. Only it's just wounded. They drag it inside and they decide its a great chance to figure out how to kill them. Until now in the film the aliens have been unnaturally tough, able to take a ton of shots before going down. The squad's medic is there and the female civilian is a vet. Now mind you this alien is still alive at this point as they begin to cut into it. It's a fucking vivesection with the medic peeling the thing's skull open and the vet cutting open it's chest, while it's moaning and trying to flop around. How do they figure out how to kill it? The vet identifies what she thinks are organs, no one has any idea what any of it does, and then Nantz stabs them. Naturally the thing doesn't die in the first few attempts. It's only right as the aliens are breaching the building that they find something to the right of where a human heart would be and Nantz stabs it and the thing finally does die. Mind you, they just filleted a wounded enemy combatant. The aliens were never sympathetic in this movie, aside from this one. It was a chilling scene to me.

This is probably a good place to talk about the aliens. The aliens themselves are about human sized, maybe half a foot taller on average. The aliens themselves are a curious design. They have an M&M shapped head atop a humanoid torso. Their arms are long and thin with three finger and one thumb hands. They don't have legs though they have four tentacles octopus style. They are heavily cybernetic with their weapons grafted to their right arms and their tentacles are entertwined in cybernetic legs that let them get around. They are odd tough in that their exoskeletons have no real armor. They have some chest plates but their legs and arms are exposed. Their guns seem to be low rate of fire, 150-300 rpm machine guns firing incendiaries. They also seem to have underslung rocket lanchers (think anti-personel RPGs). There are two kinds of aliens seen in the movie, the grunts I just described and "Officers" who didn't seem to employ the exoskeletons and float over the ground with anti-grav. More on that later.

Ok, so the bus takes off through the city and they encounter the airpower first hand. Nantz figures out that the enemy is cueing off their radios and has everyone turn theirs off. He lures the aircracft that looks in on them into a trap and destroys it. In the wreckage we learn that it's a drone.

This is pivotal to the plot. It's also the source of a huge plot hole. First off the hole. We learn from Rodriguez that she and her squad were sent into the hot zone to ID enemy command and control assets to target them for air strikes. Ok, sure. However after learning that the thing is a drone Nantz says something along the lines of "if we could find the control node we could shut them down and get our airpower back in the fight." Rodriguez then says, "I wouldn't be here if command didn't agree." Ok... wait a minute. Rodriguez was already in the city before they get to the police station. She got picked up and has been with these guys almost the entire time. Prior to getting their chopper nuked the military was operating under the assumption the aliens were an entirely ground based force which were obviously infantry. So why did her commanders suspect drones and that killing the command hub would disable them? Either they knew the aliens were going to send in drone aircraft and just didn't tell anyone else up to and including their own bomber pilots, or they made one hell of a guess.

You can guess the ultimate plot of the movie, destroy the control hub, eliminate the drones, get the airpower in the fight again.

Now the alien aircraft themselves are really interesting and really impractical. First off they are all wedge shaped. Most of the time they dock together to form a giant ring of death made up of about 8 drones. The drones can undock and move off on their own as well. How this ring functions or even why it does isn't really obvious. When together the rings act like their own craft with weapons projectors and such. The problem is the only weapons the drone obviously have is a missle launcher in the nose. (Seriously, these guys love missiles. Almost everything they have bigger than the gun the grunts carry fires between 6 and 50 mini-missiles). The rings of death seem to fire their attacks from the area of the drone's engines. I may be wrong but it was odd. The drones themselves don't rely on wings or rotors. Instead they use a very...wierd system of pulsed jets to keep them aloft. If you've seen the artwork all those protrubances? Various sizes of just nozzles. The things are literally studded with them, dozens of them, in just about every concievable direction. Very wierd. Worth point out here is the anti-grav the officers seem to have is not being used by the drones.

So they go along, trying to get out. Surface roads are clogged eventually forcing them up onto a highway. Firefight, people die, bus abandoned, they keep moving. When the deadline for the bombing arrives they are outside the zone, but barely. They huddle in the store room of a mini-mart and.... nothing.

We find out in the next scene when they get to the Forward Operating Base (FOB) to find it leveled. The aliens had attacked the bases the air strike was to be launched from and destroyed them all. Bet you feel like jackasses for waiting now huh?

The find some working vehicles and get to the last evac site, meet up with a Huey (which is now not limited to four wounded men but can carry seven soldiers, a civilian woman, and three kids. Go figure.) and get out. On the way out they spot a blacked out area and Nantz figures it must be the command node. Ya know, instead of the slightly more obvious conclusion that maybe the power is out in this half leveled city. He makes to go in alone to find it and... the whole crew comes along save the civilians. DAAAAAAWWW. Seriously, you never see the civvies again. They head into the zone, find the enemy command center and call in an attack. Cue a desperate fight to keep the control node lazed as the enemy tries to force them out and success! Note to the film guys, Copperheads are artillery shells, not subsonic cruise missiles. They win, the enemy retreats, and all the drones fall out of the sky. The enemy control node can float and use anti-grav. Not sure why the drones don't. Anyways, the good guys get out and plan to go right back to the fight. The movie ends with the marines, in Hueys (seriously?) flying back to the city with the ending tag line, "Lets take back LA."

Make no mistake, this movie is a cliche storm. From the soldiers to the plot it's nothing new but they have plenty of little aversions and twists that surprise you if you let yourself settle in to deeply into the cliches. Hell, Micelle Rodriguez even survives the movie.

Overall, I'd give it a 7/10.

Spoiler:

There is one big thing that really bugged me. The motivation of the aliens. Their reason for invading, liquid water, is beyond stupid. Why? If you have the capability of traveling between the stars water is not a big deal. First of all, there's a lot of water out in the solar system, the trick is that most of it is ice. Mining the Oort cloud would yeild you plenty of water all without the annoyance of having to fight the natives. Any other resource? Asteroid belt, mars, moons of Jupiter, you name it you can get it there all without the mess of a military campaign. Hell, even if you don't want to mine ice, water is just the byproduct of hydrogen combustion. Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. Oxygen isn't exaclty rare. If you need water combust them, it even has the nice benefit of being a net energy producing reaction.

Now there is a guy with a line saying, "We are being colonized." Now that makes sense. What does the Earth have that we haven't foudn anywhere else? Liquid water naturally occuring on the surface with a climate that can sustain life. Fighting over habitable worlds, if they're realtively uncommon, makes a lot of sense.

The movie rejects that though and they're back to the water thing with a news report that sea levels are already noticably dropping. OMG. Do you realize how much water that is? In less than five hours the aliens had apparently managed to suck up more than 150,000 cubic kilometers of water, enough to drop the sea level a meter. 150,000 cubic kilometers. How much water is that? A volume a hundred kilometers square and fifteen kilometers high. For reference civilian airliners fly about 11 kilometers high.

And if they're just after our resources why the military invasion at all? If you're just going to strip mine the place drop a few meteors on your targets. A 200m asteroid should do the trick. BOOOOM no more LA. Do that to a few hundred other places then come mop up survivors. Ugh.