Despite the horror that is daylight savings time and the foolishness of of staying up late on the night that the time skipped ahead by an hour I got up this morning and with a pal went to catch the first screening for today of Battle Los Angeles, and latest Alien invasion movie.

I was pleasantly surprised and thoroughly enjoyed myself at the screening this morning. The plot is simple and mostly what you could have expected if you had seen the trailers. Aliens, apparently in a bad mood, making water landings around the world, just of the coasts of major cities, and then without any fanfare proceed to the shoot and smash portion of their package tour. While the entire world is at war and we get flashes of news and information about what is happening elsewhere, this movie like the title suggests, is about the battle in Los Angeles.

Aaron Eckhart plays Staff Sergeant Nantz, a career Marine who is now haunted by the ghosts of soldiers under his command that fell in the middle east. Tired, worn out and beginning to fail physically Nantz wants to retire. Eckhart plays the role wonderfully understated. This is a US Marine, he doesn’t cry and moan about his troubles, but you can see them in his eyes. Of course his plans for retirement are suspended when the aliens attack and he is assigned to a new platoon and green lieutenant for action.

I have heard people compare this to an alien version of Black Hawk Down, and I can understand where they are coming from with that idea. This is a gritty style of filmmaking with an focus on making the scene look, sound, and feel realistic. To my limited knowledge that got the military aspects of the story dead on. With an unsteady handheld camera and lots of fast editing the film conveys the chaos, confusion, and calamity that is combat.

One of the aspects of this film that I really applaud the writers, producers, and director for is that this is a very personal point of view. We follow the story by way of these Marines and never do we see Generals, Secretaries, or Presidents in the story. The story is about these characters in this fairly limited time frame.

That is not to say that this film is not without flaws. The science at one point becomes more than ludicrous abd worse yet it did not need to go that far.

Some years back, 1990 in fact, a small genre film named Tremors burst upon the scene. One scenes in Tremors has the main characters trapped on a rock speculating where the monsters came from. Each characters proposes a classic SF trick that has been used to explain monstrous beasts in other films, mutated animals, aliens, government projects, etc. What Tremors never did was as a film tell you where the monsters came from because it was unimportant to the story. Battle Los Angeles should have learned from that trick, instead they try to explain why the aliens are invading. Why is unimportant to our plot, that’s for people of a much high pay-grade than Staff Sergeant and it should have been left on the editing room floor. I personally rationalized away the ‘explanation’ as merely the blathering of network talking heads and not anything based on the films ‘reality.’

Aside from that there is nothing to cause even a moments pause in recommending the people see this film.

Here’s the first trailer for the Marvel Superhero film Captain America: The First Avenger

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