“Battle: Los Angeles” is the kind of movie that would make me stop going to the movies, were it representative of the experience I’d have. It’s loud and chaotic. Instead of dialog, actors scream incoherently at each other for two hours. In place of continuity, it offers a rapid-fire jumble of nauseating images, none of which go together.
Although moviemaking is collaborative in nature, the blame for “Battle: L.A.” rests on the shoulders of director Jonathan Liebesman and writer Christopher Bertolini. There’s nothing in the film that would suggest they have the skills that would merit giving them tens of millions of dollars to make a movie.
Instead of shooting dialogue in steps and then piecing the footage together into something watchable, Liebesman shoved his camera in the faces of his actors and then followed them around. Five minutes in, I wanted to move to the back of the theater to get a better view.
His sins increased as he shot the action scenes, which are incomprehensible. There will be a close-up of someone shouting, then a shot of an alien, then an explosion, and then another close-up of someone shouting, but Liebesman did not make it clear where these components are in relation to one another. Individual shots look great, but the confusing muddle of images that make up the larger scenes minimize their impact.
Liebesman also whipped his camera around like a video gamer that’s mainlining espressos and can’t settle on a target. When used effectively, a handheld camera can create a sense of urgency and immerse a viewer in action. All Liebesman did was make a bad situation worse.
Movie directors have spent the last century perfecting a visual language and teaching it to viewers. Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Ridley Scott know audiences want to see what’s going on, and frame and edit their shots accordingly. But Liebesman and other emerging directors are replacing that time-honored form of communication with an in-your-face aesthetic that requires less artistry and delivers unsatisfying and forgettable results. Compare the random blur of images in “Battle: L.A.” to the beautifully choreographed combat in 2009’s “Avatar”, and tell me I have no reason to weep for the future of action movies.
I get what Liebesman tried to do with “Battle: L.A.” Imagine you’re a soldier, and without warning, you’re thrown into an urban combat situation against an unknown opponent. Bombs are reducing buildings to rubble, enemy gunfire is turning your friends into goulash, and aliens are descending from the sky. You wouldn’t know what to do, or even where to look.
Liebesman renders this ex-perience on the screen. But while he succeeds in placing his viewers in the middle of anarchic warfare, his technique is sloppy.
Bertolini has to shoulder some of the responsibility for this mess. He doesn’t simply mine other science fiction movies for ideas; he brazenly copies and pastes entire subplots. How many movies depict aliens arriving in motherships that control everything? And do the humans ever fail to discover the one weakness that allows them to take down these miniature Death Stars? There are no deviations from this timeless mold in “Battle: L.A.”
There is, however, dialogue composed for moviegoers accustomed to digesting information in Twitter-sized chunks. “Go there!” “Shoot that!” “Don’t die!” If a character says anything longer than two sentences, it’s escaped my memory.
Speaking of characters, all Bertolini provides are stock personalities that have more in common with cardboard cutouts than real people. As a staff sergeant with a checkered past, Aaron Eckhart plays the only character with the slightest bit of meat on his bones. Even the ETs, a strong point in movies like “Alien” and “Predator,” fail to make an impression.
Bertolini didn’t even come up with a decent reason for the invasion. Someone says something about the aliens wanting water, but beyond that, Bertolini provides no motivation for the attack. My question for him is this: If the aliens have invented technology that can transport them across vast stretches of space, why are they unable to manufacture water?
I’m tempted to touch on the acting, but I’d end up circling back to Liebesman. When a director tells you to scrunch up your face and scream, you scrunch up your face and scream. Eckhart is a great actor, and he’ll crawl out of the wreckage of this movie unscathed, but it was still painful to watch him try to dig deep and hit sheetrock two inches down.
“Battle: L.A.” is a big, brainless movie with no redeeming virtues. I was glad when it was over. Hopefully, I’ve expressed my hatred of it clearly enough to dissuade you from ever seeing it.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of war and for language. One star out of four. Next week: “Limitless.” Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.