BATTLE LOS ANGELES- Review

The makers of Battle Los Angeles have intimated that the Brothers Strause, the directors of Skyline, bailed out of their jobs as special effects artists on this one to make that one. It's an interesting story if true, but now that Battle Los Angeles has been released, it reveals that it is in fact on quite shaky litigious grounds. Skyline might be a little bit like Battle Los Angeles, but then Battle Los Angeles is a lot like many other films.

Aaron Eckhart plays Staff Sgt. Nantz, a Marine who's just handed in his resignation after 20 years of service and has a bad reputation after his last tour of Iraq went badly wrong. Before Nantz can say his goodbyes, however, a meteor shower in close proximity to the coast of Los Angeles prompts a military evacuation of the city, and he's drafted in to help out. But similar meteor showers have occurred all over the world, and it soon transpires that the meteors are cover for an invasion of Earth.

It's unusual for me, to hear a film's music score speak so comprehensively of not only the film's content, but of the film's quality. Brian Tyler, a composer on the likes of the Fast and the Furious franchise and the Final Destination franchise, has turned in the most generic and lazy assault my earholes have endured in a long, long time. We've recently seen a score elevate a film just by its presence, seeing as how Daft Punk's soundtrack to Tron: Legacy was the best and only reason for that film to exist, but Tyler actually creates a problem that brings the film down.

My hatred of the score is the most prominent thing to mention about Battle Los Angeles, because it's really just a big, loud and disengaged disappointment of the worst kind. I went in with a fair bit of anticipation for the film- I had liked the trailers, and I like Aaron Eckhart, and I was absolutely in the right mindset to enjoy it. My experience of watching the film was like constantly running after it and trying to get involved with it, but always being left some distance behind.

It's not that it's an especially complicated film, although its subplots tend to convolve the action, but it was like I was sitting in orbit of the action rather than ever becoming involved with it. There are films that have been likened to watching somebody else play a video game, and to me at least, this film is absolutely that. The cascade of disposable war movie characters are trotted out from the outset, to the point where it's impossible to tell who's getting killed off as the death toll ramps up, at least until the ending where there are only a handful of Marines surviving.

The Battle of the title is definitely the operative part, because the action is near enough relentless, in true video game style. As usual, we're siding with the humans in this battle, even though we get a very interesting aside at the outset of the action. Two snipers sitting atop a building and watching the encroaching aliens mutter about how they don't seem so different, pondering the thoughts and feelings of their opponents, which shows something of the war film the filmmakers were hoping for. The film then drops that thread as though it's a matter of total disinterest to the viewer.

Instead, we're asked to find some kind of relatable quality with characters who bitch about their personal issues with Nantz at a point in which the entire world has gone to hell. These remarkably self-centred characters are utterly ignorant of the huge world-changing events happening all around them. Just as soon as they're not shooting at them or blowing them up, that is. Aaron Eckhart gives a classy performance in a role that fits him like a glove, but Nantz is the only character whose name I wouldn't have to look up afterwards- that's how poorly these characters are developed.

The disinterest in the aliens is staggering. Some might like the way that we never get what anyone would call a satisfactory idea of what these adversaries look like, because they're only ever seen in long shots or extreme close-ups. I can see how some would appreciate being distanced from the aliens in that way, and left to come up with their own idea of what these world-invading bastards look like, but I can appreciate that someone, somewhere, actually gave some thought to the design of these things. So it's all the more maddening that we're supposed to be more interested in the human characters, who all come from Michael Bay's US military porn stock, Nantz excepted.

Battle Los Angeles has a couple of bits of properly exciting action and a decent performance from Eckhart, but all else seems so obnoxiously loud as to actually become quiet. Maybe that's what the excellent trailers were hinting at all along, because there's little of the implied subtlety of the Johann Johannson-scored trailer in the final film. The score is horribly incompetent, the camerawork is shaky and Bourne-like even in supposedly subdued moments and the character development is so negligible that you start to root for the aliens. However this battle turns out, everybody lost in the battle between this film and Skyline.

Battle Los Angeles is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Battle Los Angeles, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Attack of the 50ft Whatever- SKYLINE Review

A year ago this week, or close enough, we were treated to Roland Emmerich's rendition of the apocalypse in disaster movie 2012. In its place this year, we get another disaster movie that explores global catastrophe by more ostensible causes, a low-budget alien invasion flick called Skyline. It seems only fair in the aftermath of seeing the things to level people's expectations- those great ads and trailers you've seen don't mention that it's a film from the directors of AVPR- Aliens vs. Predator Requiem.

Letting bygones be bygones though, Skyline presents us with Jarrod, a man who flies out to LA with his pregnant girlfriend, to reunite with his rich best friend in his swanky apartment. But wouldn't you know it- aliens arrive on Earth that very night. Abduction seems to be the name of the game with countless humans being hoovered into collossal spaceships in a bright blue light that no one seems able to resist. The visitors scour the city for resistance, but for Jarrod, the survival of his family is paramount.

One of the selling points of Skyline has been how modestly budgeted it is, and the level of technical prowess on show for that comparatively low budget. In a few weeks, I'll say the same of Monsters, except that where Gareth Edwards marries alien invasion with arthouse indie cinema, the Brothers Strause have made one of those Syfy Original films. It's not Sharktopus, but tonally, it might as well be the same. And for an alien invasion film so reliant on its independent credibility, it depends on an awful lot of the sub-genre's past works.

Steven Spielberg has the rulebook pretty much tied up when it comes to alien invasion films, but it's not just the influence of his tropes that holds court in this one. There are also recognisable segments cribbed from Cloverfield, Independence Day, The Day of the Triffids and Night of the Living Dead. From Spielberg, there's the very obvious influence of War of the Worlds, with whole sequences that might as well be lifted wholesale from his 2005 version. It even cribs from Michael Bay in one eye-rolling action shot, and for the massive lapses in comprehension and intelligence at sporadic points of the film, it almost comes close to being his version of War of the Worlds. I don't wish to do the film a disservice by saying that, because for the most part, it's pretty engaging.

I'm really not sure why this film's opening in November, except to try and follow from the example of the uber-budget 2012 at the box office. I reckon this one could have held its own in the summer, especially in a summer that was lacking in new properties. Skyline might be middle of the road sci-fi action fodder, but it feels out of place as dark nights close in and Christmas looms around the corner. It also has some impressive special effects sequences, most notably in a dazzling dogfight between the US Air Force and the encroaching aliens.

There's also a nice feeling of claustrophobia. Nice, as in how it enhances the setting of the film, rather than how warm and fuzzy it makes you feel. It's not a warm and fuzzy feeling at all, but one which hangs about the characters' every action. It eschews the cliche of showing news footage to inform the wider context, instead cutting them, and thus the audience, off from any information about what is happening and why. That just makes it all the more scary whenever we catch a glimpse of the invaders, who are most often seen as a nightmare fuelled hybrid of Cyberman and Cthulhu. The information blackout is a much needed neat touch in a film that's so very derivative.

Of the Brothers Strause,  I will say this. Their experience working on SFX for huge blockbusters inbetween their own works obviously paid off when it came to rendering the other-worldly in this one. However, as with their first feature, the script and direction both need more work. There's never any feeling of jeopardy. You are more sympathetic than I am if you feel any tension or emotion for the characters beyond the standard jolts the film throws out to check you're still paying attention. Also, a nuke plays a key part at one point, just as it did in the Brothers' AVPR, and the effects of said detonation are as woefully underplayed as it's possible to be without Harrison Ford getting into a fridge.

The ending happened to be the final insult in a film that I was warming to more and more as I went along. And this is from the guy who likes the ending of The Last Exorcism. The final scene of this film feels almost like a wacky alternate ending from a DVD special edition no one's really fussed about, and had it only been left on the cutting room floor, it wouldn't have left such a bad taste in my mouth. It's a dopey denouement that's abrupt so as to suggest a sequel, and on that level alone, it works. I would totally go and see a sequel where they deal with the lumpy bed they've made for themselves with any potential follow-up. 

Skyline turns out to be one of those films that might ostensibly seem to have been cobbled together from other films- a kind of Frankenstein's movie that lumbers into multiplexes every so often to carry out the cinematic equivalent of Peter Boyle singing "Puttin' On The Ritz". It will dazzle very few audiences, and it's by no means certain that the planned sequel will manifest itself. The film is undone by the time the credits roll, but there's more than enough here to divert viewers, even if it can't quite satisfy anyone. A solid but strange B-movie.

Skyline is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Skyline, why not share your comments below? If you maintain that the ending of The Last Exorcism is crap after seeing this, then I'm still right, you're still wrong.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.