"Battle: Los Angeles"

Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?

I have suddenly stumbled across a really, really bad movie. In fact, it may be the most boring movie ever reviewed by this website. In fact, it's an early contender for worst movie of the year.

So, ladies and gentlemen, what is today's movie? Well, let's get to it...

Battle: Los Angeles

It's an alien invasion, and U.S. marines are dispatched to do something about the invasion when asked to get civilians out of there.

And... that's about as much as I care to expose about the summary. And in a way, I really don't know what the hell was going on throughout the rest of it, as the plot is driven by hyper-strategic mumbo-jumbo that we could care less about being carried out by heroes we could care less about fighting aliens we could care less about while engaging in various war movie cliches that we could care less about and watching people's phoned-in acting jobs that we could care less about and CGI effects that we could care less about.

So in other words, we're watching things unfold that we could care less about. And thus, the entire enterprise is rendered pointless. (If the run-on sentence didn't tip you off... Well...)

The best way I can describe this movie is as follows: it is a two-hour long action scene. Action scenes are fun, but in this movie the action is entirely lacking in context. It also doesn't help that half the time we can't even figure out what the hell is going on. This movie has an overreliance on shakycam and loud, boomy noises. Yes, it's exciting, but it's also prone to produce headaches and make our eyes hurt from all the fury going on onscreen.

And what else doesn't help? The characters, who are so underdeveloped we could care less about them. Yes, it's an alien invasion, but the characters aren't sympathetic enough for us to get invested in what they are fighting for. We don't hate them, but we don't like them either. And I think it comes from focusing on too many characters at the start and rushing through everything that goes into their lives before the invasion, as we don't get time to get a good sense of the characters apart from 'Character A has a fiancee, Character B has a dead brother, Character C has stuff to fight for', etc. And it's also to the film's detriment that some of the major characters don't come in until after the main action has started. There's almost no concentration on the human element with these characters, and what could have been a very deep movie is instead cliched and entirely uninteresting.

It doesn't help that these are some of cinema's least-interesting aliens. And yes, I get that it's from the point of view of the soldiers and they don't have time to develop the aliens, but everything about them screams 'generic alien invasion species'. Nothing about this movie felt intriguing in any way, especially not the action scenes which consist of guys hiding behind cover and shooting at things. That's not exciting enough for me to be invested in what's going on.

It's just... the whole movie is full of eh.

You know what the saddest part is? The trailers for Battle: Los Angeles were actually pretty interesting. I want to say this movie is every bit the movie Skyline wanted to be. But no... it's one of the most painfully generic movies I've ever seen thanks to how utterly uninteresting everything is.

Skip it.

Also, "Original Films", I want my money back. All fifteen dollars of it. Preferrably now.

0.5/4

Do NOT see this movie at any cost.

This is Herr Wozzeck Reviews. I'll see you guys next time.