If you’re a sci-fi enthusiast, you will hate this movie. If you’re a war film buff, you will hate this movie. If you enjoyed any of the Transformers movies, you will hate this movie. But if you honestly enjoyed those movies, I guess it’s safe to say I hate you too. No amount of Meghan Fox could ever make those movies watchable, and even using her as a reason to watch them is a bit of a stretch. Just how many explosions can Michael Bay squeeze into a two hour time frame? Not enough to make the movie any good, and they certainly shouldn’t inspire other directors to follow suit. Just ask Battle: Los Angeles.
Alright, you've got my attention. How could this possibly suck?
Battle: Los Angeles was a fucking turd, hands down. Never have I watched a flick with larger gaping plot holes and a complete lack of story. In comparison, porno has more substance than this two hour travesty, and at least in a good porno those gaping plot holes are at least filled with something.
So just where do I begin? I guess it doesn’t matter, since there was really nothing chronological about the movie to begin with. Hopefully I can save you $9.00 with this fair review. If you plan on watching this movie anytime soon you can choose to stop reading now, but I assure you that it won’t make any difference because there is no movie to ruin – just two hours of worthless dialog and explosions. But whatever, the choice is yours. Oh, and since I believe it is required: (spoiler alert)
Characters and Character Development – In the first twenty minutes or so we are introduced to a cast of characters, each of which is allotted no more than two minutes. Some guy is getting married. Another guy is visiting his dead brother. They speak a few words but none of them hold any merit or require any form of comprehension. We are offered a small window into their insignificant lives, a miniscule amount of time to form some sort of a connection with these characters, but don’t let their back stories or everything that should matter about these characters fool you because beyond this meager introduction you learn nothing more about these people. In fact, once all hell breaks loose you’ll be lucky to remember their names or even attach a face to said name (if you’re lucky (or anal retentive) enough to remember it). Hell, by the time the movie ends you won’t even care that most of these people have died. Every last one of them is forgettable. Expendable. Worthless.
From left to right: guy number one, guy number two, alien guy, guy number three.
Emotion and Empathy – On the topic of death, our lead guy (Harvey Dent) shows little emotion the entire film, even after half of his squadron is killed. But the moment a civilian dies toward the end of the movie, all of a sudden he can bring himself to care. Everybody suddenly remembers that they’re fighting for something. Death, itself, has finally sparked an emotion. I’m sure Death himself wiped his brow after that endurance trial and screamed, “Fucking finally! Millions dead and you finally shed a fucking tear? God damned robots.”
Nobody appreciates good, hard work these days.
The entire movie stops for a few minutes while they mourn the loss of this one, unimportant asshole that they’ve been toting around for half of the movie. Seriously, the guy decided to play hero, was shot in the abdomen as a result, and our company of heroes in turn needs to lug his carcass around for an hour because they feel indebted to him for some reason. The mere fact that their friends and family in the Los Angeles area (along with 80% of the world’s population) were likely used as target practice by our alien invaders means nothing to these people. Instead it’s this one trivial death that reminds them that they’re human and should feel something. Every last one of them is probably a puppy kicker.
Plot Device and Reasoning – I think the most hysterical aspect of this movie is the reason the aliens are here in the first place. After our heroes get to a safe place Michelle Rodriguez (forgot her characters name, but you can’t mistake her – she plays the same role in every movie she’s ever fucking done) plugs in her laptop and is still able to connect with the rest of the world through a wired connection. She called it “hard wired”, so we’re assuming there’s still a network infrastructure in place and that it’s still functional to some degree, despite the fact that the city is in total fucking ruin. I guess you have to suspend belief in order for certain movies to work, this certainly being one of them.
At any rate, after she gets all “hard wired” they find out that the aliens are here for our liquid H2O. You read that right. “Liquid H20”. Because apparently that’s what they use for fuel. Essentially they traveled light years just to gas up. There is no other underlying reason for their violence. The ocean isn’t vast enough that they could swoop in, refuel their ships and be on their merry fucking way. No, instead they have to park off the coasts of major cities around the globe to fuel up, and hell, kill a few people while they wait (to be honest I hate waiting while pumping gas, too).
So we’re left to assume that the aliens are just assholes that need to either die, or finish gassing up and get the fuck out of our yard. I’m sure there were other reasons for their visit, but they simply aren’t vital enough to inform the audience of or use to drive the plot.
As a side note, at some point toward the end of the movie a scientist points out that the ocean levels have dropped a significant percentage since the alien’s arrival. There are about twenty invasions going down across the world, and there is one mother ship at each location. In size comparison, a mother ship is nothing more than a grain of sand (a few city blocks at most) compared to the vastness of the oceans. Yet these mother ships have managed to suck up so much water that the water level in our oceans has dropped significantly, or at least a readable percentage. I’m curious to know just how they figured those physics, and how the oceans became a measurable resource in the first place.
Improbability – After their first few run-ins with the alien bastards the area that they’ve been assigned to has grown a little too quiet. We go from non-stop gun fire to dead silence. There’s no movement, everything is still, and our heroes need to find a better way to get around because moving by foot is getting to be too cumbersome (especially now that they’re lugging around civilians, and essentially dead weight). So assuming all the aliens are either dead or left the area, they find a city bus which they board and drive around the city for some twenty minutes. Now, with no other moving vehicles in the area, no other people walking the streets, this big fucking bus is just driving around, minding its own business. In reality it would have stuck out like a sore thumb and drawn the attention of any aliens within a two mile radius, but it does not. Apparently the aliens are content on letting them enjoy their joyride across town (or maybe they were just on their lunch break). Again, you have to suspend belief a little, but belief and reality in this movie is like a rubber band that’s reached its snapping point by now.
Broken Plot Points – So we have our band of heroes trying like hell to get to a safe zone because the area they’re in is about to be carpet bombed by the military, the exact same area that is now showing less life than your friendly neighborhood morgue. The absence of alien life or any form of movement has kind of made bombing the area pointless, yet our heroes don’t even bother relaying this information to the military. Instead they’re just sitting back, perfectly content with letting the military waste precious bombs and resources. Why not bomb where there is the high concentration of alien presence? I guess that would make sense and ruin the patterns that this movie is trying so hard to form.
Then when they finally reach this safe spot they all take cover and anxiously wait for the bombs to drop. And maybe this is just a personal peeve of mine, but I can’t stand it when movies do this. They all turn their gaze to a clock on the wall, and as soon as the second hand on this clock is about to reach the number twelve they all squint and brace themselves for an epic explosion that never happens. Just like the fabled 555 numbers used in television and Hollywood, I loathe the assumption that every clock on the planet reads exactly the same. For all we know this clock is three minutes off, but no. By some minor miracle this clock reads exactly the same as everybody’s military issued watch. By now total immersion into this film is lost.
The Spoken Word – There was some dialog throughout this film’s two hour duration, but none of it held any merit or served any purpose that would benefit the movie in any sort of way. In reality the movie would have been more effective if all these clowns would have just shut the fuck up and gone about their business, leaving us to our imagination, a tool that could dream up a million and one better scenarios than the assholes that pieced this pile of shit together. Every character was forgettable. Their stories were forgettable. By the point the world starts exploding, your thoughts and opinions mean literally nothing, so who cares? We don’t, so either kill something or die already.
<insert any dialogue that will help give the movie any substance here - don't leave it to these assholes>
Climax – We finally reach the end of the movie which is exciting. Not because something amazing is going to happen, but because we know that the credits will be rolling within minutes at which point we can leave and try to reclaim our lives.
At any rate they somehow know that they need to destroy the mother ship which will essentially disable all of the alien’s flying units. Maybe they learned this from watching other science fiction movies, who knows. It’s an assumption at best, but like Grampappy always told you – “Go with your gut.” Why they’re so concerned with the flying units is anybody’s guess. Truth be told, up to this very point the ground units are the ones that have been fucking everything up. I mean, maybe the flying units have done some damage someplace, but again, we wouldn’t know. All we know as an audience is that they need to be taken down, immediately.
So we’ve finally reached the scene in the movie that we saw in the trailer and made us interested in seeing this movie in the first place. The mother ship (which has been silently hiding beneath the streets of Los Angeles for some time now) finally bursts through the Earth’s crust and takes to the air. The US military begins firing cruise missiles (which are controlled by some laser homing beacon) to try and bring it down, but all these god damned clone units (flying vehicle thingers) keep intercepting the fucking missiles. This goes on for a good while until the pinnacle of the battle is reached. There’s one missile left. There’s on clone unit left, and our last missile is sailing through the air, seconds from impact, except it looks like that clone is going to intercept the missile and foil our attempt at saving humanity. But wait! One of our cast of many forgettable characters just happens to find a fucking Bazooka lying around, at which point our main character (Nick Naylor) howls over to him, instructing him to use the Bazooka to blow that mother fucker out of the air before it’s too late. Now let’s just assume that our missile is just circling in the air or taking a detour while waiting for the all clear, because that son of a bitch was just seconds away from being wasted on another clone about a minute ago.
So guy number three (that’s the name I’ve given him) looks to the sky, and somehow locates the last flying clone ship amid all of the chaos, raises his Bazooka, and without so much as aiming the god damned thing he fires off his round and obliterates the clone (which is seemingly a good mile away at the very least). So apparently this guy is arguably the greatest trick shot in the history of forever. But like I said, reality went out the window a good hour ago, so God could reach down from Heaven and crush the mother ship with his cock at this point and it’d be on the same wavelength with the rest of the flick. At any rate, with the final clone ship out of the air our missile can now safely be guided to the mother ship which it is, blowing the floating city out of the air and saving humanity. Victory is had. Our heroes rejoice. Hooray.
Resolution – The ending of the movie is the absolute best part for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it’s the end of the movie, which means we’ve served our sentence. Secondly, we find out that the movie was a comedy all along. Our heroes have been extracted after the epic battle to bring down the mother ship and taken to a safe point outside the city limits where they can gloat, slap each other on the ass and wash the stink off them. But a hero never rests, am I right? No, instead our main character (Lee Blanchard – seriously, you spend the entire movie wondering what other films you have seen this guy in) decides he’s going to go back into Los Angeles to finish what they started. Admirable. And naturally all his cohorts decide to go back in with him when in reality any sane person would say, “Good luck with that fuckwads, I’m hitting the shower.”
Instead they all pile into a chopper and fly back to Los Angeles, and this is the greatest scene of the entire film because they fly up over a hill and see the entire city in ruin. City blocks are gone, the sky scrapers are torched and about to collapse, there’s literally nothing left to save. Regadless of the wasteland that lies before them our main character has the audacity to say “Alright, let’s take back Los Angeles.”
Sadly I couldn't find any stills of the scene described above, but just imagine this picture with a lot more red and orange. And less skyscrapers towering in the background.
Take what back exactly? It’s a lost cause. I don’t think you can call the firefighters and kindly ask to have this enormous inferno extinguished (if they’re still alive to begin with). Picture a bon fire the size of Los Angeles and that’s what we’re gazing upon in the final moments. By the morning the city will be a charred pile of rubble.
I'll grab the broom.
You failed to save the city. There’s nothing to take back. Let it go. Game over. And even if you somehow managed to down this single mother ship, there are other major metropolises around that world that are already in worse shape than Los Angeles, so is there really any hope? No. So bend over, grab your ankles and take what’s coming to you.
We should have watched Hall Pass instead. I’d rather have stared at Owen Wilson’s fucked up beak for two hours.
Posted in Celebrities, Movies, Opinion, Rant
