Battle Los Angeles (12A) **
Directed by: Jonathan LiebesmanStarring: Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Ne-Yo
This, presumably, is what event movies will have to be in our present age of austerity: purged of expensive stars, and with vast chunks of action conveyed by wobbling the camera Star Trek-style and having characters gawp at monitors showing CNN footage. The livelier, low-budget Skyline got here first; now Sony offer us aliens who resemble the old Smash robots on the scrounge for the Earth’s water resources, quite possibly to whip up some instant potato. With their usual poor timing, the invaders show up just weeks before Staff Sergeant Eckhart’s retirement, Corporal Ne-Yo’s wedding, the birth of someone’s first child…
The film sticks its dull humanoids with dialogue that’s woeful even for the subgenre, and never really makes this particular L.A. – a place of remarkably resilient billboards for soft drinks and collapsible freeways that coat everything else in a dismal greyness – seem worth fighting for. Overseas concerns, as ever, go under-represented: Liebesman’s interest lies in Marine Corps firepower, of a type you’d hoped Team America had satirised beyond repair, and which may well leave you cheering for the extraterrestrial underdogs. The X-Box game it wants to be would be ten times more involving, and wouldn’t feature Ne-Yo.
Battle Los Angeles opens nationwide today.
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