So last night I hit up a local beer hole with an old pal and then dragged our sloppy asses to the movie theatre to see the latest in a string of alien apocalypse filmes Battle: LA, starring Aaron Eckhart (Thank You For Smoking) and Michelle Rodriguez (S.W.A.T.). From the beginning of this movie I knew I would have to brace myself for some very atypical disaster movie cheese. The film starts off with some very Armageddonesq cheesy character introductions, where we meet the typical group of movie marines, as well as their cheesy melodramatic back stories. The main character, SSgt. Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart), is the typical seasoned war vet who's "seen too much", who we learn at the beginning is considered kind of a traitor throughout the other marines for getting some men killed in the Middle East.
Following the character introductions the story starts to pick up at a feverish pace. You learn that Alien crafts (origionally thought to me meteors [DERP]) are landing, dropping off aliens and fucking up everything in sight. And of course the marines are too the rescue.
After a while though the movie starts to come into it's own and you can actually sort of enjoy it. I found the camera work really cool, the film uses a lot of handycamish shooting techniques and in your face angles to add more of a sense of realism (though I'm sure it could make a lot of people sea sick). I was happy to see that they did didn't fuck up when designing the aliens. The creatures were a species that survives off of water and rely on surgically implanted devices to move quickly and fight. The aliens were, from what I could see, eyeless and very skinny.
Though there are some cheesy moments that will have you rolling your eyes, and the fact that this is nothing more than the typical alien disaster apocalypse movie it was actually enjoy able. The explosions and CG were enough to keep me awake, and are the best part of this movie. You basically don't go more than 5 minutes without hearing something blow up or the exchange of bullets. Overall Battle LA was a good movie, but with several character, dialogue and storyline issues plus a distracting amount of product placement. I give it a 7 alien water sacks out of 10
