It’s very difficult not to compare films sometimes. Sometimes films demand that you look at other films and witness how they did things, then now how the film you’re watching does it differently. Battle: Los Angeles should not have demanded you make those comparisons.Time: Now. Place: West Coast America. U.S. Marine Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz (An alarmingly chinned Aaron Eckhart) is taking leave of his career after losing men on his final tour. Seemingly coinciding with Nantz’s last day a meteor shower hits earth, spraying the American coastline with lumps of metal that suddenly begin to take shape as an invading force of lumpy aliens. Dragged back into the force the battle begins to save L.A. as Nantz and his squad set out to kick some alien butt.
Despite some interesting looking special effects, and Aaron Eckhart’s watchablity, this film is depressingly dull. Not in the crushing, angry, hair-ripping Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) sense, merely in the way of this being a missed opportunity. In the wake of rip roaring alien science fiction such as District 9 (2009), crowd pleasers like Avatar (2009) and excellent indie offerings like Monsters (2010); it’s hard to understand why director Jonathan Leibesman has made such a derivative, messy and wholly unsatisfying movie. The first thing that strikes you about the plot is its hackneyed, dull premise. Aliens invade. That’s it. Everything that the film throws at you is saddeningly similar to something you’ve seen before. As alien invasion movies go it’s Independence Day (1996) without the tongue-in-cheek humour, Starship Troopers (1997) without the gleeful satire, or even War of the Worlds (2005) without the skillful narrative direction. Battle: L.A. is a plodding, overly patriotic, overly sentemental mess that’s half an hour too long.
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