Cineworld Challenge Film #3 – Battle: Los Angeles Cert 12a
@Cineworld Wakefield, 14/03/2011 1pm
Trailers : Source Code, Limitless, Fast Five, Bad Teacher

Big budget alien invasion movies can go one of two ways. They can either fall into the Independence Day category and contain a good story, tension and a healthy dose of humour OR they can be straightforward blam blam blam action, no real storyline and characters you don’t really care about.

Unfortunately, Battle: Los Angeles kinda falls into the latter category.

The action gets underwater from the get-go. We see marines (as if it would be anyone else) being deployed to an invasion before a quick flashback to introduce all the flimsy characters. Aaron Eckhart’s character is the only one with any substance and it’s only a few minutes into the film that you find put his character lost and entire regiment not too long ago (ain’t that always the case?).

And so the alien invasion comes, well I say alien but these ain’t the cute weed-smoking aliens from “Paul”. Nope , these are super advanced killing machines with only destruction on their minds.

The special effects are pretty damn amazing to give the film it’s credit where it’s due. But there’s only so much gunfire you can take and unfortunately it’s pretty much relentless throughout. The only thing this movie was missing was a gung-ho Michelle Rodriguez type to pop up and…oh wait, yeah they’ve even thrown in that cliche!

It’s a decent enough effort but not a film I would be revisiting as many times as I have with other outer-space encounters.

Overall rating 4.5/10