Battle: Los Angeles. Written by Christopher Bertolini. Directed by Jonathan Liebesman.
It's been years now since worldwide revenue from video gaming surpassed films (in 2008, $30-40 billion in revenue for games vs. $27 billion for movies). Yet the tail still seems to wag the dog in terms of the direction content is fed: games based on movies are commonplace, but movies based on games are both rare and, with few exceptions have been commercially disastrous (remember Prince of Persia?). It's tempting to speculate about why game-based movies tend to be, well, bad. Video games may lack drama, for instance, because they are only about perpetuating conflict--keeping the game alive--instead of resolving it. And there's the pervasive juvenility of the material, which is meant to appeal to pubescent boys of whatever gender or calendar age. But mere badness has never been a reason for Hollywood to neglect a commercial opportunity. Sure enough, we now have Jonathan Liebesman's Battle: Los Angeles, which may be the first movie to look and feel like a video game, without actually being explicitly based on one. Even the title looks more comfortable on a box at Best Buy than a movie poster. It also has the virtue of leaving plenty of room for future upgrades (Battle: New York or Battle: London, anybody?)
Whatever it is, Battle is an alien invasion story more or less in the tradition of Independence Day, albeit using the gritty, hand-held aesthetic of District 9. Instead of a massive spaceship, the aliens arrive in "meteors", and once they land, there's no contrived countdown until the fighting starts--the bugs just come out blasting. Fortunately, a rainbow coalition of US Marines--including more than a few Hispanics (Avatar chopper-chick Michelle Rodriguez, Ramon Rodriguez), blacks (Cory Hardrict), an Italo-American paesan (Gino Anthony Pesi), a Nigerian (Adetokumboh M'Cormack), and one or two Anglos (Aaron Eckhardt) chopper in to defend the Santa Monica pier from annihilation.
Predictably, our boys (and girl) spend the first two thirds of the story getting their camo butts kicked, Starship Troopers-style, until they scope out the enemy's soft spots, after which tide turns in equally predictable fashion. The script by Christopher Bertolini is largely one long action sequence, making us all feel like twelve year-old boys refusing to take a bathroom break from a first-person shooter game. The movie offers up the combat and the combat clichés ("I'd go to hell and back for you, man!") with such shameless abandon that it's easy to forget the obvious objections...such as, why would the aliens negate their advantage in firepower by getting themselves bogged down in house-to-house urban fighting? Indeed, why don't they just nuke us from space and avoid the fight altogether? Well, almost easy to forget...
While it has none of the epic sweep of Independence Day or pulpy fun of District 9, Battle: LA is not boring. There are a few moments, such as when the Marines are on the verge of flying into battle against an unknown enemy, that the film generates some suspense. One senses that behind the clichéd treatment is faith in our reverence for the self-evident goodness of our boys in uniform--that through their fictional sacrifice, we all should be willing to cut them some slack on hackneyed dialog like "It's OK to cry, man!"
In a way, it's not a bad gamble--the military regularly polls among the most trusted institutions in America. But polls can’t write our screenplays for us. At least not yet--man.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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