Battle Los Angeles (2011)

  

Description :

With Battle: Los Angeles screenwriter Christopher Bertolini (The General’s Daughter) and director Jonathan Liebesman (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) have created a video game of a war film by mashing together Black Hawk Down and District 9 with an invasion to match War of the Worlds. “Battle: Los Angeles” is a Columbia Pictures release, directed by Jonathan Liebesman and is rated PG-13 for sustained and intense sequences of war violence and destruction, and for language. The running time is 1 hour 56 minutes
The cast includes Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Peña, Bridget Moynahan, Ne-Yo, Taylor Handley, Joey King, Ramon Rodriguez and Cory Hardrict.
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This film can’t match the intensity of Black Hawk Down despite trying to be as chaotic and fast paced. It doesn’t delve into the politics or morals of District 9 even though desperately clinging to the idea of what it means to be human. And it doesn’t reach the scope of War of the Worlds as it turns into another film hell bent on destroying and saving Los Angeles as the rest of the world waits in ruin for the City of Angels to save itself.
Shortly after the pieces are placed on the board and the game begins.
Meteors begin falling from the sky. Aliens emerge from the ocean and begin annihilating those sunbathing on the beach. The military has declared “Threatcon Delta” as Los Angeles is turned into a war zone. Rubble rains down on the greying and smokey landscape. Battle: Los Angeles is a sea of concrete, explosions and gunfire. The action is fast, furious and increasingly numbing.
Don’t expect to find character attachment or much of a story outside of the idea the world is under attack and a team of soldiers are the last defense against it. The comparison to today’s video games is an easy one, just think “Call of Duty” meets “Gears of War”.
For me it served as a satisfying diversion. Explosions occur. Loud noises. Gunfire. Aliens and destruction. As opposed to a first person cam, Liebesman flips it around and gives us a gun barrel cam aimed back at a soldier as he scans for an extraterrestrial in his midst. The rest is filled with handheld camerawork as shaky as we’ve seen in most actioners since Paul Greengrass and Oliver Wood popularized it in 2004 with The Bourne Supremacy. Of course, the subtlety Greengrass and Wood employed is absent here and cinematographer Lukas Ettlin even gets a bit melodramatic with his movements.
From a filmmaking perspective, none of the camerawork really impressed me. The acting? On top of the comparisons I’ve made, I don’t think a comparison to Michael Bay’s Transformers is out of the question. Battle: Los Angeles is a more enjoyable film, but it is just as destructive, loud and senseless. The difference, I would say, is the action in Battle: Los Angeles forwards the film’s momentum whereas the action in Transformers is a distraction from the film’s lack of momentum.

Download : Battle Los Angeles