Battle: Los Angeles

Battle LA is sort of a Black Hawk Down ripoff with Aliens. They did bother to cast a very good actor (Aaron Eckhart) as the main lead but there really isn't much acting required in the film. The first 45 minutes or so include about 5 minutes of fighting and 40 minutes of cheesy emotional scenes involving marines, some of whom are unbearably retarded. Most of the retarded marines die out by the end which is a blessing.

The first major fight scene takes place on a bridge, several marines die and they kill a few aliens along the way. It is a decent enough scene, while the film does use the evil shaky cam it isn't all that unwatchable during the 2 best action scenes (up to that point you really can't tell what's going on at all). Evidently the aliens use some sort of slow moving artillery piece like a cannon despite being vastly technologically superior to the US and have to manually control it personally, though fortunately the Marines are terrible shots so the only way they kill it is with a giant explosion.

Aaron Eckhart does a reasonably good job in his role, despite all the forced silly emotional scenes he does do a convincing enough job in the last 2 or 3 of them that they actually work, while the rest of the movie might have had you facepalming. I'm pretty sure Call of Duty increased the amount of business this movie did by about 20 million, since it shockingly did 36 million in 3 days while being fairly mediocre. Eckhart is essentially Rambo and invincible in the film, though the other soldiers think he'll purposefully get them killed since he's too awesome for them.

The last sequence of events is great in this movie, it doesn't make any sense but it is fantastic. Evidently aliens use some sort of immobile contraption to control their drones from afar. Obviously in a "realistic" alien setting they'd have a self propelled battleship or something and it would be guarded by more than just a few dudes, but either way that's what they fight against and it is pretty exciting to watch. It would have been great if the whole movie was like this with just a few cheesy emotional scenes but it was not to be. If Unknown is still in theatres I'd suggest you go see that since this is much worse.

Final Score: 6.5/10

Notes
Apologies for not having a post yesterday but something distracted me. MSU got a 10 seed in the tourney though they're in the same bracket as BYU so I don't expect them to get past the sweet 16 at best. Still it's a nice improvement over a few weeks ago when it looked like they wouldn't get in at all. It must be nice having 14 losses and still being in the tourney... I picked OSU to win it all in my first bracket setup.