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.
Now that 2010 is mercifully behind us and everyone has bored everyone else to tears with infinite lists of varying unimportance, I thought I may as well get in early with my favourite films of 2011.
Now obviously I haven't seen any of these yet, so it's a largely unjustified - not to mention pointless - list, but I firmly believe this is exactly what my favourite films of the year will be come the end of December. If I'm wrong you are all welcome to write a lengthy comment about what a waste of time this post is, although if you're going to do that you may as well say the same about all the other posts and that would be an even bigger waste of time, only yours rather than mine. OH THE IRONY.
And before you go any further I would just like to briefly apologise on behalf of various film studios for not having any official title designs for certain films, rendering this post even more amateur than it already was.
1
Opens August 19th
2
Opens April 22nd
3
Opens April 8th
4
Opens September 16th
5
Opens June 2nd
6
Opens March 11th
7
Opens August 12th
8
Opens July 15th
9
Opens March 18th
10
Opens December 26th
Hmm. It occurs to me that I really am the definitive Empire magazine reader. Anyway, was I right? Come back in twelve months and find out! Or, you know, come back every day. That would be better.
The final day of Movie-Con had a more relaxed pace than Saturday, which was a relief because I was starting to live life like it was a trailer, getting annoyed with all the gaps in conversations and music failing to drop out every time I made a crap joke.
A long scene from Tron: Legacy showing Garrett Hedlund being transported through the bowels of an Xbox raised my interest in the film by 1%, which means I might watch it on the telly. The 3D was good though, which is something I'll never admit actually thinking or writing if pressed.
I'm similarly disinterested in Machete, although the scene in which the titular Mexican mentalist abseils from a window with the aid of someone's large intestine certainly caught my attention.
Battle: Los Angeles looks like a less slick Independence Day with equally little irony; a fight scene from The Green Hornet was better than the trailers we've seen so far, and Ironclad is a gory medieval sword-orgy directed by a man called Jonathan English. Johnny, as he didn't call himself, introduced a clip with all the enthusiasm of a teenager reading an essay on Flemish porridge farming, then pulled a face when, during his panel, people asked his cast about their other projects. Quite right too. Why would the Empire Movie-Con audience want to quiz Jason Flemyng about Kick-Ass 2 rather than a film set in Rochester Castle starring Paul Giamatti as King of England?
Future best mates of The Incredible Suit Simon Pegg and Nick Frost turned up to introduce a long trailer for Paul, which was very pleasing. I'm slightly worried it might end up like one of Pegg's "other" comedies (you know what I mean), but to see the eponymous alien extending a middle finger and proclaiming "It's probing time" was good enough for now.
Undisputed nadir of the weekend came in the form of a diabolical gobbet of guff about Resident Evil: Afterlife, in which director and unbearable imbecile Paul WS Anderson repeatedly and ill-advisedly compared his film to Avatar before stating, with a completely straight face, that "You make a better product when you make it in 3D". Words fail me, although two very obvious ones spring to mind immediately.
Later on I failed to win the Bastard Hard Movie Quiz, and failed to get excited about the impending "re-version" (dear God) of Brighton Rock, although director Rowan Joffe offered a robust defence of his film and explained some of his artistic decisions clearly and interestingly. I liked him enormously but I doubt I'll go and see his film.
Then I saw Scott Pilgrim vs The World. More on that another day.
So that was Movie-Con III. In short, there was too much footage we'd all seen on the internet already but the exclusive stuff, the guests and other assorted fun made the weekend a big hairy bag of geeky funballs, and I congratulate Empire and the BFI for organising it just for me.
