Skip to main content

Battle: Los Angeles - Most Underappreciated Movie Of The Year?


I watched Battle: LA over the weekend, and I gotta say, I don't see where all the hate for this movie comes from. Maybe hate's a strong word, but I don't recall seeing a single positive review for it.

To summarize, it's the story of a Marine unit that's tasked with evacuating Los Angeles during an alien invasion. I don't want to get too spoilery in this, but I thought it was a pretty good movie. I can see how it might turn some people off though, because it doesn't really fit into any of the standard science fiction move genres, kind of like District 9. Not to say that the two movies are at all alike, other than neither of them really fits into the "blockbuster scifi explod-aganza".

The entire time I watched the movie, I was saying to myself, "these feel like real marines" they aren't supermen, they're not geniuses, they aren't unkillable. One of my favorite parts of the movie is during the first up close confrontation with an alien, a marine shoots it, and it falls back into a swimming pool. The other marines catch up to him, and the alien jumps back out, all of the marines fire at it until it goes back down, and Aaron Eckhart's character says: "Toss a grenade in the pool and let's get moving" in any other movie, they'd assume it was dead, or send someone in to make sure, and maybe take it into custody, but in this movie, they just want to get it dead, so they can continue with their mission.

This movie doesn't really have any deeper meanings, and really, slight spoiler, they don't completely fight off the invasion by the end. The marine's complete their mission, win a victory, return to base, and go back out again, that's the movie. There's some really stupid sounding stuff about why the aliens are invading, but it really just seems like it's supposition on someone's part, the aliens never communicate or talk, there's no big reveal, just people making guesses based on what they see.

So, if you want to follow a realistic group of marines through an alien invasion, this is the movie for you, if you want the next Independence Day, Avatar, or Distict 9, you might be a little disappointed.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

       I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week.        While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but the original Optimus Prime mig

Naked Heat: Reviewing this book makes my brain hurt

I finished the latest book by Richard Castle a few days ago, and I've been thinking about how I want to write this review ever since. You see, Richard Castle is a rock star amongst murder mystery novelists, he struck it big with his series of Derek Storm novels, but shocked the world by killing the character at the end of the last book in the series. After that, he found inspiration in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, and based his new character, Nikki Heat, off of her. Naked Heat is the second book in the Nikki Heat series. What's so weird about that? I'm sure all three of my regular readers already know, but none of these people are real, Rick Castle and Det. Beckett are both characters on ABC's crime/drama/comedy series Castle. Haven't watched Castle? For shame, I highly recommend it, it's a perfect guilty pleasure movie, a series of one and done murder mysteries, that are fairly light hearted, with a great comedy dynamic between the characters of Castle, Becket

What It's Like To Get Pipebombed

Well, I'm going to break with my rule of not actually mentioning anything about having a pipe thrown at you, but in celebration of the 6 month anniversary, I really wanted to write it up. So, without further ado, here's what happened on my Fourth of July 2009, and the six months since: So, it's the Fourth of July, 2009, about ten-ish or so at night. Being that we live in a condo, and our homeowner's association has prohibited fireworks being let off in our complex, we decided to take a walk around the neighborhood in order to better see the fireworks everyone else was letting off. We walked straight out the front gate, got about maybe 50 feet down the street, and a dark car with it's headlights on pulled out onto the street, about a block ahead of us a man with a white shirt was walking in the same direction as us, nothing noteworthy about either of those. However, upon passing us, something was tossed out of the passenger window and bounced off my chest, upon the g