Battle: Los Angeles Review

Battle: Los Angeles is a bad alien invasion movie.  I give it 2.5 out of 10.  Overall this movie has some interesting ideas behind it with some nice details.  Unfortunately that is overshadowed by some major flaws in execution.  Unfortunately I wish the people who put together the amazing trailer for this movie would have been in charge of the entire film.  Don’t bother watching it save your money and time. 

What I expected to find is

• Action lots of action

• Explosions, I said lots of action including explosions so many to make Michael Bay proud.

• Cool aliens, they should at lest visually be stunning.

• Cool alien tech preferably attached to the action and mecha / giant killer robots a plus.

• A fun movie

What I got was action teasing that promised but made me wait too long to deliver.  There are a lot of explosions but by then I was too bored to be that excited in them.  The aliens are neat and there are some cool details about them.  The alien tech was lacking and no more impressive then what we already have on this planet, they did travel across the universe to attack us.  Not a fun movie.

Battle: Los Angeles has a nice start with action and explosions promising a good alien invasion movie.  This was sadly replaced with over 15 minutes of boring, slow paced, unnecessary character development and melodrama.  After almost putting me to sleep we got back to the fight. 

The character development piece failed in bonding me to the characters and instead made me angry at the characters and more to the source with the writers for wasting time and excitement on character tropes that could just as easily been presumed.  After all the lead character could have just said “I’m getting too old for this shit” and done away with 5 minutes of the beginning plus I might have chuckled at the line.

Problems with Poor cinematography.  They tried to go for a jerky camera style to add to the tension, excitement and first person perspective.  A neat idea if pulled off well but for some reason some directors think that I’m a bobblehead doll.  In the heat of action I do not jerk my point of view around and stay out of focus in fact things tend to be more in focus and my point of view does not jostle that much even running.  Instead in this film there was a lot of jerky camera action and out of focus moments broke the immaculate reality.  They would have been better off just giving us a third person view at that point.

The roller-coaster pacing left me angry and in the end made this a boring alien invasion movie.  Bang!  Explosions with promise of action for a few minutes followed by 15 minutes of non action, that is just the beginning of the film.  There were moments of intense cool action but those were followed by major lows of boring narration and agonizing melodramatic moments. 

Likes

• The start was exciting giving promise of action, explosions, and aliens

• When there was action it was exciting, just unfortunately punctuated by long moments of boring narration and melodrama

• They had some neat details like the alien anatomy and flyers

Dislikes

• After the short beginning there was 15 minutes of slow paced narration and unnecessary character development.

• Poor cinematography

• Roller-coaster pacing

• Too much melodrama:  I actually like and watch some really melodramatic shows but this crap was out of place and too much even for me.

• Too much narration

• Lacks tension