Battle: Los Angeles

Rating: ***

The alien invasion genre has been enjoying a resurgence lately. There was last fall’s SKYLINE, this coming summer’s COWBOYS & ALIENS, and the highly-anticipated TV drama FALLING SKIES. But for now we have BATTLE: LOS ANGELES, a film that could euphemistically be called BLACK HAWK DOWN with flying saucers. Actually, it’s a fairly apt description, though a tad ambitious given everything. Still, for a satisfying, gritty, urban warfare epic, BATTLE: LOS ANGELES is actually very satisfying.

The set-up is simple: aliens arrive off the coastal areas all around the planet and their intentions are immediately identified as hostile. Wave after wave of Marines are being sent in to combat the aliens’ ground assault (fortunately, for some strange reason, they have no air support…yet). One squad of Marines, led by a green lieutenant, are dispatched to help recover civilians from the war zone before the Air Force begins their bombardment. Naturally, complications occur, and the squad is left to the command of Sergeant Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart), who’s close to retirement and haunted by some nondescript war drama.

The film is solid in setting up the battle, and doesn’t try and bog the thing down with some unnecessary melodrama, or over-complicating the aliens and their reasons for descending on planet Earth. SKYLINE failed epically because the motivations of the aliens are unclear, and their motivations weird and terrifying. Combined with the fact that all the human characters in that movie, including TV’s Eric Balfour(!), were beneath contempt and what was left was a movie neither compelling or particularly engaging.

The urban warfare perspective serves BATTLE: LA better as opposed to the SKYLINE’s whiny condo dwellers approach. The action is well-directed if not inspired, but director Jonathan Liebesman wisely shirks the idea of going full handheld with the action, but still manages to level a touch of realism to how the film is made. In other words, this isn’t pseudo-war documentary, or rather what some people think the way a war documentary should look. The action is fairly solid, and, admittedly, it’s gratifying to see an alien invasion movie that doesn’t try for one minute to be STAR WARS redux. (INDEPENDENCE DAY, I’m looking at you.)

But let’s rewind for a moment, and revisit the alien’s motivation. Apparently, they’ve come to our world looking for water, which seems to be how they power their ships, and hey, they just love the stuff, I guess. (I wonder if they’ve ever warred against the aliens from SIGNS?) Set aside the fact that water is one of the most common compounds in the universe (we seem to find it everywhere, even in our own solar system), and its base components – hydrogen and oxygen – are two of the most basic elements in the universe, the aliens still had to come to Earth to find water?

Setting aside that they can travel hundreds of light years across the universe but can’t smash some hydrogen and oxygen together to get water, why do invading aliens even need motivation? It’s been a while since I’ve read WAR OF THE WORLDS, but I don’t remember the passage where the unnamed protagonist gets the expository behind the invasion. Maybe aliens can be dicks. Maybe they don’t like our faces. To me, no motivation, articulated or supposed, is better than a stupid one like they hate us for our water.

But back to the movie, which as I said, is perfectly serviceable and actually rather enjoyable. You are kind of sad to see the soldiers dispatched when their time comes, and Eckhart is truly effective as the sergeant that keeps the unit together despite everything. BATTLE: LA is lo-fi, effective popcorn action with a little bit of sprinkled melodrama for seasoning. It’s a satisfying effort all around, even if it doesn’t reinvent the wheel in the process. Or is that saucer?