It’s been a while since I did a review. My 52 movies at the cinema plan for last year stalled at 22 due to some rather nasty back trouble. However I am now back on the movie going scene, and so decided to add Battle: LA to the only other movie I’ve seen this year The King’s Speech. Now obviously The King’s Speech is a relatively low budget, beautifully produced and acted Oscar winning piece of movie magic, whilst Battle: LA is none of these things. It’s a £50M special effects laden, poorly acted, wham bang thank you ma’am action blockbuster popcorn movie. And that’s fine, who doesn’t need a good popcorn movie now and again? Personally I love ‘em, eyes on, brain off, go! Impress me…

…and it’s here that we encounter the first of many many problems with Battle: LA, I couldn’t switch my brain off. Unfortunately this isn’t due to Battle: LA being a surprisingly cerebral movie, it’s just down to the absolute stupidity of the plot and the huge and varied holes within it. I mean alien invasion movies aren’t that difficult, are they? You take some aliens, you throw in some humans, they meet, they have a fight, many explosions, flashing lights, whizzing noises and a rousing rallying speech later, we all walk out into the sunlight blinking our eyes, already forgetting what we just saw, but pretty damn happy anyway. Job done. Not however Battle: LA.

Battle: LA gives us aliens, it gives us an invasion, it even has some lights and noises, however the alien invasion they give us makes no sense. The motivation of our extra terrestrial visitors is briefly covered in various news type segments as colonisation for resources, namely water. Fine. But if they want water why are they attacking LA and a score of other major cities, why not attack say New Zealand? Low defence, hard to get to for humans, surrounded by water. If it’s colonisation, then why only attack a score of cities, and why attack at all unless you are sure of victory? I mean it’s not like you had to show up, and again why not start with a bridgehead and…and…You get my point. I shouldn’t be thinking about this when watching the movie, but I was, and it bugged the hell out of me.

But why am I thinking so much, surely I have explosions and action to keep me occupied? Well no, not really. This then is Battle: LA’s second big issue, it talks too much. Not a common complaint with action movies I’ll give you, but true none the less. The Director, Jonathan Liebesman, seems to have decided he’s going to make us care about his characters, so we can share in their tension, shock, horror and joy. However he doesn’t do this by using suspense, creating a sense of foreboding, comedy, or anything resembling a decent and believable character back-story. No, he does it through a series of 5min ‘quiet moments’ interspersed throughout the movie, each seemingly designed to disrupt the action just as we’re getting into it, and each leaving me wishing they’d just shut the fuck up and get back to shooting something. And that inspirational speech I mentioned? It does show up, 2 for 1 in fact.

“The action though!? It’s rocks yes?” I hear you ask. Again, not really, in fact I couldn’t even call it competent. This is at heart meant to be Independence Day meets Black Hawk Down (both glorious, if flawed, action blockbusters), but it seems to take the worst elements of both, remove the good stuff, and smash it together into something that just doesn’t work. There is none of the WOW factor or threat to mankind of Independence, and none of the foreboding, unrelenting tension and sense of danger of Black Hawk Down. As for the effects, they aren’t particularly special by today’s standards.

And that is pretty much that. I didn’t even bother mentioning the actors, since none of them do a particularly good job, and most of their characters are literally instantly forgettable. Props to Aaron Eckhart though for doing a convincing job of showing why he should have been Captain America 10 years ago. I have to say I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out what this movies purpose was, as the only thing it seems to have succeeded in is advertising the US Marine Core, even managing to squeeze in the 5 years service gets you citizenship line, no seriously it does.

It’s not often I come out of an action blockbuster surprised or disappointed, I know what I’m getting going in after all. Battle: LA manages it though, and not in a good way.