BATTLE LOS ANGELES (2011 - Cert 12a)

With titles such as LA Noire, Heavy Rain, Grand Theft Auto 4 and the Uncharted series, the video game industry is pushing the boundaries of what that particular medium is capable of. The games are now extremely cinematic in their outlook and development, they have fully developed narratives, rounded characters with depth and emotion, in other words your actions, as the gamer, have consequences. It's come a long way since Pong. With the incredible sums of money generated by the games developers and distributors, many people have commented that it has the potential to even become the new cinema. So while people who make the games are striving to improve plots, hiring well known screenwriters, actors and directors, cinema needs to do something to stop the supposed shift from popcorn to the joypad.

Battle Los Angeles appears to think that cinema should do the same thing in reverse. While games aspire to be cinematic, Jonathan Liebesman wants cinema to be emulate the formula that have made games so successful.



This isn't a gripe at the overuse of CGI. Yes, there is a lot of computer generated effects in the film, but that's the way things are now. It's a film about massive alien spacecrafts attacking the earth, you expect these to be created with a few clicks of a mouse. In fact, the effects are very impressive, possibly some of the best I've seen, all for a relatively modest budget of £70m.

No, my complaint is that the film seems to have been structured just like a video game. It's as if someone applied tracing paper over the game blueprint and completely copied. Action, dialogue, action, dialogue, action, dialogue. I appreciate that this is the general state of big budget blockbusters, that's no different from Transformers, Indy or Pirates, but it's the quality and purpose of the dialogue between bangs that is the problem. It's there solely to introduce the next piece of action, setting up the next mission or level. If anyone has played a video game, like Tomb Raider for example, you will know that in between stages there is a 'cut scene', which basically comprises of poor acting, a number of cliches, all culminating in a 'now we need to go and get this thing and put it in that thing'. End of cut scene, off you go. That is exactly what Battle Los Angeles is like, but with cranked up cliche. Characterisation is kept to a minimum, instead the marines are lifted from any story involving marines we've ever seen. Aaron Eckhart, the lead (looking bemused as to why exactly he is doing this (money of course)), has a back story involving Iraq and losing a team of soldiers, blah, blah, blah, do we think he might reprieve himself and exorcise those ghosts? This collection of marines also appears to be the most annoying set that could have been found or created. A number of 'not really knowns' struggle with Christopher Bertolini's useless script. The grunts from Aliens this is not. It's gratingly irritating, formulaic, exposition, nonsense that serves only to get in the way of the alien bashing, which is another facet that looks at (and steals from) video games.

When our marines first encounter them, they are sneaking through claustrophobic LA streets, darting in and out of houses, the camera leaping about from one point of view to another. Yes, just like a First Person Shooter but with photography that could have been lifted from The Hurt Locker of the Green Zone. Liebesman has clearly been playing Call of Duty or Resistance, because he has served up as FPS film. At first it's quite exhilarating and tense, there is something quite interesting about an alien shoot out that feels and looks like an Iraqi war film, but set in the States, but it all wears very thin, very quickly. You play video games to feel involved, watching Battle Los Angeles is like sitting their watching someone else play a game that you have no interest in. It's boring. What is also unforgivable is that at first the aliens seem to need hundreds of bullets to kill them, then our heroes discover what part of the body is weakest. Once that happens, only a couple of bullets are required to dispatch, no matter how far away the shooters are. The menace completely vanishes and the aliens become an annoying part of the scenery.

Does it do anything well? I did like the fact that there was no story set up with the aliens before it all kicks off. It is very much filmed from the view of the marines, and they are thrown straight into it without any warning or real intelligence. I presume that is true to many of the missions that they undertake, they wouldn't be party to all of the facts. Unfortunately, Liebesman and the script don't have the conviction to carry on with this, instead the reason for the invasion is speculated on in television and radio reports, completely falling out of sync with the rest of the film. It simply doesn't fit. It smacks of film makers patronising the audience, presuming that we would not be able to cope without some sort of background.

I had looked forward to this, I love a monster film, I love a big budget popcorn churner, it looked like it might be an interestingly gritty glimpse at a war that human kind could really lose. Instead, it's a shallow bore of a film without any emotion at all, very rarely excites and never engages.