Battle Los Angeles

Arriving several years too late for anyone to care about an alien invasion movie but not late enough to avoid unfavourable comparisons with the genre's most recent standout entries, Battle Los Angeles has to pull something pretty special out of its extra-terrestrial egg-sac for anyone to give a shit about it. Predictably, it fails to do so on almost every conceivable level.

It's the story of a crack unit of Hollywood special effects technicians who set out to destroy Los Angeles (presumably New York was busy that day), and a heroic team of nondescript US Marines armed only with cursory, minimal backstories and incessant captions to remind them where they are in the plot.

After the obligatory fifteen minute introductory scenes, there's some kind of Battle in Los Angeles that goes on for nearly two hours, pausing briefly once or twice to allow a marauding horde of clichés in and to randomly shift the action between daytime and nighttime depending on how much of the budget had been used up. The final showdown sees our heroes firing lines like "We're fighting for our country, goddammit!" and "Let's take back Los Angeles!" at the boring aliens in their mothership stolen from District 9 and, well, see if you can guess what happens.

With nothing to say about or add to its already overcrowded sub-genre, Battle Los Angeles is that rare thing: a film that makes you pine for the subtlety of Roland Emmerich. So save your money, dig out your Independence Day DVD and if Battle Los Angeles makes enough money to warrant another episode in the aliens-invade-coastal-metropolis franchise, get ready for Battle Cleethorpes: The Fight For Pier 39.