Wednesday, March 16, 2011

World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles


I have just watched this long US Marine propaganda film, in some standards can be called movie, named World Invasion Battle Los Angeles in its first day in Singapore. Yes the one whose trailer features a sad song sang by a robot drag queen, but no they do not show her in the movie. It is not a bad movie as Skyline, if you do not expect anything other than some action, kicking asses of aliens (if they had any). These aliens are also braver than the aliens in Independence Day they land and fight like real aliens. On the other hand this movie is neither classic nor slightly more than average.

First of all the director is a wrong decision. This movie should be directed by one of the directors of the great TV Mini Series Band of Brothers or The Pacific. Then we would have a visual show of chest to chest fight between aliens and marines. Unfortunately the camera moves so fast and shakes a lot. There is no single action screen with a steady shot. I can easily say the movie is poorly shot. It is so sad actually, this could really be a good war movie even with this weak plot but what came out from this team is visually very very poor.

Second they should get away with over emotional American mood to be more international (what the hell was that "you are my little marine" ?!?!). OK the main audience is USA citizens but come on even it is sometimes ridiculous for them.

Third they should use some of the budget for CGI to show some aliens. Well there is definitely something on the other side shooting at the Marines but what you usually see is a blurred scrap metal art works but they are not as good as the ones you can see in Thailand.

At the end, my score is 5 out of 10. If you watch it, it will not bore you but visually annoy you. If you miss it, you will not miss much.





-- spoiler --

The film kick starts with a blitzkrieg style alien invasion. It looks like they even do not bother to hover spaceships in the sky for a while to look cool but actually this is probably because they cannot hover. Their technology looks more advanced than humans but not that advance. They even do not use laser guns and their ships stay airborne by old fashion rocket/turbofan style engines.

Throughout the movie, we follow a multi racial US Marine unit whose job is to rescue some civilians trapped behind the enemy lines. During their mission they will realize that although enemy is very powerful, they can be killed and destroyed.

As in the Independence Day, these aliens also have an Achilles' heel which will be discovered by our team. There you know the aliens were well advanced in technology but were still using networks compatible with ours (most probably TCP-IP) so we could upload a virus to their systems. Here, although these aliens are brave enough to fight on land and flew long long way from outer space, they do not pilot their aircraft but use solely drones. Lucky for mankind. This will prove to be deadly for aliens and there is a lesson here for military strategist, do not solely count on technology, if it fails you fail big. Also they are stupid enough to directly dive into a fight instead of trading as much water as they want with some advanced weapons.

It was actually a clever move to have a city fight with aliens but as I mentioned before, this move is nulled by the poorly shot and directed fight screens.

-- spoiler --

No comments:

Post a Comment