Now Playing: Battle: Los Angeles (2011)

I have been looking forward to this movie for months and finally I got to see it today. I've been avoiding trailers for Battle: Los Angeles ever since I saw the first teaser months and months ago. I was a little worried when I started hearing negative reviews for it, but then I was also hearing just as many positive reviews. All I could do was go in with an open mind and enjoy the action, if possible. I didn't even know who was in the movie until I saw them come on screen. I was quite surprised to see Aaron Eckhart starring in it since I just saw him yesterday in Paycheck. I wasn't sure what I would be in for after that movie. Hit the jump to see if I was in the negative or positive side.


Right off the bat I'd like to address one of the main complaints I've heard about Battle: LA, the writing. Actually, I didn't have a problem with it. I've heard it's very cliche and poor, but to be honest, that's kinda what I expected going in. It's an alien invasion movie where the S hits the F. I can imagine in a situation like that, people wouldn't be too worried about being clever or whatever people were expecting out of the movie. To put it simply, I just didn't notice the writing or script to be bad, it just seemed to fit and I had no problem going along with it and enjoying the movie.

Michelle Rodriguez

As far as the acting went, I also thought this was pretty good. I believed all the characters to be soldier marine types, although they were a little more stereotypical than say the marines in The Hurt Locker, but still not bad. Aaron Eckhart did a fine job, and I was also pleasantly surprised to see Michelle Rodriguez show up as some kind of tech specialist. It was nice to see her play a role that wasn't quite so badass tough as she normally plays. Sure she's still a soldier, but she plays it a little more friendly than usual and it was a nice subtle change.

Now let me talk about the special effects and the action. I thought these were really well done. The aliens and ships and helicopters all looked and felt real to me and very convincing. The gun fights were endless, and the explosions were also great and there were tons of them. Basically the action was great in my opinion.

Now an important part of a movie, especially an action movie, is that you need to have a good sense of the geography of the scenes. By this I mean you need to be well aware of where a character is in relation to everything else. If a movie simply showed a character looking out of a window, and an alien coming in a window, you need to know if that is a window in another room, if it's upstairs, or if it's right behind your hero etc. For Battle: Los Angeles I almost always had a good sense of where the characters were, which rooms were adjacent to which and so on. I often find this lacking in some action movies. A few times I was disoriented by the inevitably used shaky-cam, but for the most part I could still tell what was going on and who was engaged in which fights. Whether our team of heroes was being flanked or if they were in an all out firefight, I rarely lost my sense of the geography of the scene. The few exceptions were in scenes when it seemed appropriate that I, just like the characters, wouldn't know what was going on creating a sense of tension and panic.

Lost of fire, explosions and gun fights with aliens in Battle: Los Angeles

In the end I quite enjoyed myself with Battle: Los Angeles. It's a straight up action movie with nothing fancy, and I can see how that may not be what some people are looking for. If you liked the most recent Rambo movie, you'll probably like this, but don't expect anything like District 9 here. This is a popcorn flick through and through, and in the end, it's really up to you if you can enjoy that kind of a movie. Personally, I liked it and didn't regret paying for my ticket, which is a relief after so many poor movies earlier in the year. Also, this was far better than Skyline.