Big thing probably go boom by movie's end
dir: Jonathan Liebesman
Finally, Shakycam has come of age. It’s been a long, agonising adolescence, but this most painful of weapons in the director’s / cinematographer’s arsenal is now constituting the entire running length of goddamn movies. Even the opening titles get to squiggle and spaz around like a meth addict with no meth, money or people to blow for money.
Eh, it’s not so bad. Depending on the venue, I find that if I sit far enough back from the screen, instead of being actively aggravating, it’s just a mild irritant at worst and a confusing blur at best. Far enough in this context is right up the back against the goddamn wall.
World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles is the full title of the flick, apparently, which seems to imply that if it’s successful enough, an entire series of World Invasion flicks will ensue. World Invasion: Battle Morwell, World Invasion: Battle Ulan Bator and World Invasion: Battle Yackandandah are doubtless on the cards if the right return on investment is achieved. Considering the fact that much of the flick looks like it was filmed on someone’s mobile phone, and that the aliens themselves look like they were created on a Commodore 64 computer, it shouldn’t be too hard for them to break even.
Evil bloody aliens. I was expecting, considering the studio behind it, that there’d be sly implications or allusions to the aliens being stand-ins for people jumping the border and stealing all the landscaping and service industry jobs Americans no longer want to do for less than minimum wage, but apparently not. They’re just your average bipedal species with a head shaped like a muffin top hell bent on destroying all of the peoples of the world for their precious, precious water.
Huh? Water? A talking head on a television somewhere indicates that the aliens, in between pretending to be meteorites and attacking all the world’s major cities, are stealing all our precious water, because it doesn’t exist anywhere else in the universe as a liquid. That make sense to someone, somewhere perhaps. As for the aliens, they must have finally reached breaking point and had enough of paying exorbitant prices for bottled water, I guess.
Whatever their motivation, and whatever the price of water at their galactic equivalent of a 7-11 or Kwik-e-mart, nothing justifies killing scads and scads of Americans. But that’s what these selfish so-and-sos end up doing. And they would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for the fighting spirit and military pluck of the United States Marine Corps.
A few minutes into the flick I turned to my beautiful viewing partner and said, “This thing is going to have every American military cliché in the book.” I was so very very not wrong.
Tick them off on your fingers if you like, or the stumps where your fingers used to be before the accident: grizzled old veteran (decorated but low ranking relatively) who’s getting too old for this shit, has to strap on the webbing and lock and load once more; same veteran lost all his Marines in Iraq, and is haunted by their memory which is just begging for a speech and some dollops of redemption; a green junior officer conflicts with and then has to turn to the grizzled veteran for clues; soldier leaves pregnant wife to serve; female warrior having to prove she’s as tough as the boys to earn their respect; representatives of every major ethnic grouping in the States excluding American Indians; a guy desperately wanting someone to give a letter to his wife; cowards finally summoning the will to fight; a green, virginal soldier who’s never known the love of a woman (and not because of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell), the list goes on.
In the biggest cliché, the aliens themselves, despite having mastered Earth’s communications and such, haven’t watched Star Wars yet, so they don’t know how inadvisable it is to pin all their invasion plans on buildings or structures that have that one fatal flaw that can destroy everything they have and all of their hopes and dreams of global dominion.
Haven’t they heard of redundancy systems, fallback plans, and basic effective design principles?
Fuck no. Even though they’re intergalactic badasses, and they look completely implacable and unbeatable for most of the film, they have that one fatal flaw.
It’s not vanity, or booze. It’s something far more prosaic, being the putting of all your galactic eggs in one Death Star basket.
I hesitate to call any of the people in this flick characters with the exception of the one played by Aaron Eckhart as the Staff Sergeant at the centre of the film. The entire shaky, palsied flick rests upon his manly, ever so patriotic shoulders. Usually his roles require him just to be that charming arsehole with the shit eating grin, but he’s capable of, well, not much more. He can be great in the right role, in the way that he was fine as Harvey Two-Face in that most recent Batman flick whose name temporarily escapes me. He’s perfect in this flick because there’s no requirement for actual acting, just for action movie acting.
Honestly, as bad as the flick sounds, it is fine for what it is. It is not a flick that needs or allows for a lot of thinking. It’s calculated as a rah-rah fist pumping USA! USA! USA! rally for a select audience of people who can’t get enough of that at sporting events. It’s an action flick that lifts scenes and moments and setups from Saving Private Ryan and a bunch of first-person-shooter computer games and brings them back to where they belong on the big screen. It’s a purely visual and visceral experience.
And I have zero problem with that. Why should I? It’d be churlish to reject the magic, the wonderment they achieve here. This flick has all the imagery and fighting you’d want from a modern war flick, with none of the pesky ideological / moral issues, because they’re fighting literally faceless aliens monsters bent on humanity’s extermination. Who could possibly oppose such a set up, ya ungrateful commie-pinko-hippies?
Truth be told, most people should oppose this kind of stuff, but for my money (meager as it is), it delivers exactly what it promises without being as utterly dumb as Independence Day, and it doesn’t have Tom Cruise in it, which is one point in its favour against the Spielbergian War of the Worlds remake.
And I enjoyed it. I’m not ashamed to say it. I like these kinds of flicks when the action’s competently handled, and the sequences where they take on the alien menace with a plan (especially towards the end), are shot and edited for maximum jittery tension, and they hit their marks as they should. Probably, and I’m not usually the kind of person who has the temerity to say this kind of crap, but the action scenes resonated with me far more than the speechifying scenes (despite Eckhart’s skills as a rugged emoting machine), and I wouldn’t have minded if it had been even more actiony and violent.
It’s violent, yes, but not gratuitously so, certainly not gory at all. There’s no satirical element to the flick (in no way is it similar to something like Starship Troopers, which mocked the fascist trappings of the military and the ruling regime), so don’t confuse it for any of that highfalutin’ intermallectual crap. When it’s charging along at full speed, you barely notice what might be missing, and that, at least for me, didn’t impede my enjoyment.
And sometimes there’s nothing wrong with that as long as a lot of stuff blows up real good, kids.
7 times Aaron Eckhart coasted merrily along in this awesome flick on an air of entitlement and self-satisfaction out of 10
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“Can I help? I’m a veterinarian” – Battle: Los Angeles
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