battlefield los angels who's gona go see it ?

[John O.]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

I enjoyed it. Eckhart was great as the main character. It was fun for being little more than a loud war movie with aliens. I liked the character moments more than it sounds like most people did. It's a movie that I'll definitely pick up when it comes out.

Tell me one other place aside from Earth you know of that has liquid water in abundance on its surface for a fact. Not dissolved in dust and dirt, not frozen in ice caps nor hidden under a 2km thick crust of solid ice.

If you can, you might win a Nobel prize.

Absence of proof isn't proof of absence.

The scientist in the film says "we're the only planet in the known universe with liquid water on it." (emphasis mine)

That's quite a bold statement for someone to make! Considering how limited our sample size is.

Actually, the quote said that we're the only planet in the observable universe with liquid water. That takes on a completely different meaning, and when one considers how many planets we've found in general, and how many earth-like planets we've seen, that would make that statement completely accurate.

Anyone still arguing about this is missing the crux of the point - Trekker and Locutus are right, it's simply meant as exposition.

Honestly, I think the line was just poorly written. Was it meant to try and say "we've surveyed and cataloged a couple dozen planets and none have a drop of liquid water"? Of course not, it was meant to say "after ~60 years of moderate solar system exploration we haven't seen any really obvious signs of water like, oh say, A GIANT OCEAN VISIBLE FROM SPACE." They were just trying to answer the "what do they want" and "why did it bring them here" question in one line, it was just poorly written.

Locutus, I agreed with your assessment - Blackhawk Down with aliens - A

 

[Admiral2]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

So at the end of the movie, when the off-screen voiceover guy was like, "Let's take back Los Angeles," was I the only one thinking "Screw Los Angeles"? I would have focused on retaking San Diego before Los Angeles.

I was thinking, "There's no Los Angeles left to take back!"

In a war, land is land.

Los Angeles's enemy forces no longer have viable command and control.

You go for the enemy's weakpoints first. There has been a turning point in the war there. You keep going until battle there affects other battlegrounds.

So you're both wrong.

LA is a perfectly valid target.

 

[RoJoHen]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

So you're both wrong.

Thanks so much.

 

[Admiral2]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

So you're both wrong.

Thanks so much.

You're welcome. Happy to help add some perspective.

 

[Star Wolf]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

So at the end of the movie, when the off-screen voiceover guy was like, "Let's take back Los Angeles," was I the only one thinking "Screw Los Angeles"? I would have focused on retaking San Diego before Los Angeles.

I was thinking, There's no Los Angeles left to take back!

Well I was thinking that the British Empire was taken by holding major port cities. By the logic of the movie LA was evacuated. After all squads of Marines were sent to pick up three people who stayed behind. LA was important because of where it stood and its artificial harbor. We had to take it back to kill all of the enemy before they regrouped.

 

[Trekker4747]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

As for the water thing, melting ice in space is pretty difficult task.

Dude, traveling across the galaxy in spaceships in anything short of eons is a pretty difficult task. If you've mastered that it seems pretty easy that you can melt ice. It makes about as much sense as that alien species we met in "Enterprise" where the "closest thing to water" they could make were gelatinous cubes. Yeah, it's just so damn hard to burn Hydrogen in an Oxygen-rich environment.

So, sorry, if an alien race has mastered interstellar travel I find it hard to believe that they can't round up some asteroids or land on distant icy moons and melt ice into water or simply just burn Hydrogen.

I'll give you that energy weapons, advanced weaponry and shields may not be a 'given" but that they were after a building block of life (as we know it) that's in abundance in our solar system and likely in the universe seems a bit of a stretch.

Get Hydrogen, but it in an Oxygen-filled room, light a match. Congrats, you've made water. (Well, vapor, you still have to condense it.)

The water thing, to me, just didn't make a lick of sense.

 

[Star Wolf]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

You are embedded with a rifle squad behind enemy lines. What a talking head on MSNBC/FOX said about the cause of the war really has little meaning as you have found an intermediate objective, the enemy HQ.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

I liked the liquid water thing. It's possible that it's rare and they wanted it. Certainly, in the movie universe, you have to accept that much as a fact. Granted, the tv guy didn't know this, but how else would they have gotten the line in?

 

[RoJoHen]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

I just wish for once aliens would invade for some other resource. Oil. Cargo pants. Anything!

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

I thought his last paragraph was pretty funny too. It's just a joke.

It doesn't offend me or anything, I just found the insults rather unprofessional and below Ebert's usual standards. He's still my favorite reviewer.

This movie is filled with an alien invasion and explosions and even, in fairness, a few cool visuals; but it's also filled with cliches, characters no one cares about, REALLY bad dialogue, and really shitty shaky cam action.

I cared when Lt. Martinez and Mr. Rincon died after sacrificing themselves. I cared when Sgt. Nantz risked his life to take out the drone. I cared when they started reloading their magazines to go out again at the end. I thought they did a great job of making you identify with, cheer on, and care for the characters.

I disagree that the shaky cam was distracting from the action, but again the style was a deliberate choice by the director to simulate the type of footage coming from handheld cameras carried by troops and reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan. That it was going to be in that style was pretty evident from the trailers, clips, interviews, and articles on the film, so it's not like people were given something they weren't expecting.

The biggest cliché was that Eckhart's Sgt. Nantz suffered from an advanced stage of Roger Murtaugh's Disease, where the symptoms are that the closer you get to retirement the more likely it becomes for shit you're too old for to go down. But that's hardly a dealbreaker. Ebert calls the "usual" multi-ethnic makeup of the Marine platoon cliché, but that's pretty much what a Marine platoon looks like in reality.

I don't disagree that Independence Day had a lot of shittiness going for it. I didn't like it either. But, the one spot where it's more successful than BLA was that it had humor and had a lot more fun with the whole invasion.

But 'BLA' never set out to be an scifi-action-comedy like 'ID4' was, so the comparison doesn't make sense. It intended from the start to be a serious action movie... with aliens. 'Black Hawk Down,' which inspired it, wasn't exactly a laugh riot either, but it never tried to be.

You mentioned 'Transformers 2' above as an example of a movie that was exactly as advertised. Except it wasn't. It was supposed to be funny; it was unfunny and offensive. It was supposed to deliver better action; it was a poorly edited and uncoordinated clusterfuck of metal. It was supposed to have a tighter story; it made no sense whatsoever. It was supposed to make the villains more fearsome; Megatron was reduced to The Fallen's sidekick and Devastator went out like a punk. Transformers 2 didn't come anywhere close to delivering on what it was described and advertised as.

What about BLA wasn't as advertised, though? Serious tone modeled on Blackhawk Down. Check. Filming style reminiscent of handheld cameras of troops and combat correspondents. Check. The chaos of house-to-house urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan transposed to American suburbia. Check. Intense action. Check. The very things Ebert criticizes were deliberate stylistic choices to mimic the fog of war in all its "noisy, violent, ugly" and "senselessly chaotic" nature. Criticizing BLA for being violent and noisy is like criticizing 'The Blind Side' for featuring too much football. That's what the story is about, so what did he expect?

BLA is a paint by numbers invasion movie coupled with a paint by numbers military movie. 2 sets of cliches for the price of one! Again, not to say ID4 was good - it was a D+ to this movie's D.

I've never seen an alien invasion movie as seen from the perspective of grunts fighting a ground war in the neighborhoods and freeways of suburbia. That's fairly unique and not at all "paint by numbers." As far as it being a paint by numbers military movie, again, it was intended to be. The director was completely open with the Blackhawk Down comparison, hence the helicopters being taken out and the troops being stuck fighting house to house on the ground without air mobility against a more numerous enemy.

LA was still viable and populated as a city, during the battle in B:LA, yes?

Not really. Anybody who hadn't evacuated was already dead.

There's ten million people in LA County, and no way in hell they all got evacuated, even with the evacuation started well before the invasion due to the meteorite shower. The freeway gridlock is awful on a good day, not to mention with the whole county being evacuated.

The aliens and humans were fighting with conventional weapons and for all the explosions and fires most of the city was still intact. All the skyscrapers and other buildings were still there, just jacked up. The Marines we followed were in the first area hit (Santa Monica), so obviously it's going to be worse off, but I'd bet that there's tens of thousands of people still spread throughout the city, fighting the aliens themselves or hunkered down awaiting a chance to escape.

So at the end of the movie, when the off-screen voiceover guy was like, "Let's take back Los Angeles," was I the only one thinking "Screw Los Angeles"? I would have focused on retaking San Diego before Los Angeles.

The Marine commander said that they had lost contact with San Diego before Eckhart's platoon deployed. That could mean communications were jammed (though that's unlikely, since they communicated fine and the aliens were actually using that to track their location), that San Diego was under attack by ground forces too (unlikely since only twenty cities worldwide were attacked, so why so many in one state?), or that the aliens just took it out to eliminate the naval forces there.

 

[Star Wolf]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

I just wish for once aliens would invade for some other resource. Oil. Cargo pants. Anything!

There was War of The Worlds with the clothes being immune from the death ray.

 

[RoJoHen]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

Not really. Anybody who hadn't evacuated was already dead.

There's ten million people in LA County, and no way in hell they all got evacuated, even with the evacuation started well before the invasion due to the meteorite shower. The freeway gridlock is awful on a good day, not to mention with the whole county being evacuated.

The aliens and humans were fighting with conventional weapons and for all the explosions and fires most of the city was still intact. All the skyscrapers and other buildings were still there, just jacked up. The Marines we followed were in the first area hit (Santa Monica), so obviously it's going to be worse off, but I'd bet that there's tens of thousands of people still spread throughout the city, fighting the aliens themselves or hunkered down awaiting a chance to escape.

I admit I don't know anything about LA (I have never been farther west than Des Moines, Iowa), but I thought the movie implied that LA was a lost cause. That's why they were just trying to evacuate as many people as possible before blowing it all to hell. I had pretty much presumed that most of the people were already dead.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

They mentioned a line. It wasn't the entire city that was going to be bombed, just one area that was already hit and where most were dead, had fled, or needed to be evacuated.

 

[RoJoHen]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

Ah. Well, there ya go.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

As for the water thing, melting ice in space is pretty difficult task.

Dude, traveling across the galaxy in spaceships in anything short of eons is a pretty difficult task. If you've mastered that it seems pretty easy that you can melt ice. It makes about as much sense as that alien species we met in "Enterprise" where the "closest thing to water" they could make were gelatinous cubes. Yeah, it's just so damn hard to burn Hydrogen in an Oxygen-rich environment.

So, sorry, if an alien race has mastered interstellar travel I find it hard to believe that they can't round up some asteroids or land on distant icy moons and melt ice into water or simply just burn Hydrogen.

I'll give you that energy weapons, advanced weaponry and shields may not be a 'given" but that they were after a building block of life (as we know it) that's in abundance in our solar system and likely in the universe seems a bit of a stretch.

Get Hydrogen, but it in an Oxygen-filled room, light a match. Congrats, you've made water. (Well, vapor, you still have to condense it.)

The water thing, to me, just didn't make a lick of sense.

You're assuming they had conventional spacegoing ships that could stop, survey a solar system for frozen water sources, and melt it down. But the movie doesn't support that.

They didn't slow down enough to land gently (only enough not to die on impact). They crashed into the ocean in landing pods like meteorites, which leads me to believe they basically flung themselves toward the target planet in hibernation and had to land in liquid water in order to fuel up before they could fight at all. The aliens in the many landing pods that were shown to miss and crash land in the city probably died or never powered up at all, unless their alien homies from the ocean gave them some water later on. Notice how they stayed underwater for a while before finally rising up to attack the beach? They had to power up first. They probably simply didn't have the power yet to melt ice out in deep space.

Plus, they obviously want to colonize Earth itself, not melt some frozen ice ball in the Kuiper Belt or Europa. Our atmosphere is compatible with their physiology (the aliens were exposed and "breathed" normally), and we have 70% or our surface covered in liquid water that doesn't require any processing. If all they cared about was taking the water and leaving, why attack the coastal cities at all? Why not just nuke the surface, steal all the water you want, and leave? It's clear that - as speculated in the movie - they want to colonize the coastal regions of the planet and have unlimited access to our water with the intention of living here permanently.

I think they're desperate (but still powerful) refugees from a dying planet making Earth their new homeworld. Maybe after they've pushed the humans back from the coasts they'll propose a deal to share the planet, or just keep fighting them indefinitely.

 

[Star Wolf]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

Not really. Anybody who hadn't evacuated was already dead.

There's ten million people in LA County, and no way in hell they all got evacuated, even with the evacuation started well before the invasion due to the meteorite shower. The freeway gridlock is awful on a good day, not to mention with the whole county being evacuated.

The aliens and humans were fighting with conventional weapons and for all the explosions and fires most of the city was still intact. All the skyscrapers and other buildings were still there, just jacked up. The Marines we followed were in the first area hit (Santa Monica), so obviously it's going to be worse off, but I'd bet that there's tens of thousands of people still spread throughout the city, fighting the aliens themselves or hunkered down awaiting a chance to escape.

I admit I don't know anything about LA (I have never been farther west than Des Moines, Iowa), but I thought the movie implied that LA was a lost cause. That's why they were just trying to evacuate as many people as possible before blowing it all to hell. I had pretty much presumed that most of the people were already dead.

The weakest part of film for me was not the water but the evacuation mission. In hind sight I would rather just have the squad out front of the battalion as the advanced guard and having them cutoff. But they did play the evacuation like they do on 24. Three people left in Santa Monica after the enemy shoot up the beach when landing...

 

[Star Wolf]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

They mentioned a line. It wasn't the entire city that was going to be bombed, just one area that was already hit and where most were dead, had fled, or needed to be evacuated.

Okay I will nit pick, they said Lincoln Blvd. Easy walkig distance, no need for the bus. Infact it would have been the first freeway onramp for the freeway battle further east where the interchange and bridges are.

 

[Trekker4747]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

There's ten million people in LA County, and no way in hell they all got evacuated, even with the evacuation started well before the invasion due to the meteorite shower. The freeway gridlock is awful on a good day, not to mention with the whole county being evacuated.

The aliens and humans were fighting with conventional weapons and for all the explosions and fires most of the city was still intact. All the skyscrapers and other buildings were still there, just jacked up. The Marines we followed were in the first area hit (Santa Monica), so obviously it's going to be worse off, but I'd bet that there's tens of thousands of people still spread throughout the city, fighting the aliens themselves or hunkered down awaiting a chance to escape.

I admit I don't know anything about LA (I have never been farther west than Des Moines, Iowa), but I thought the movie implied that LA was a lost cause. That's why they were just trying to evacuate as many people as possible before blowing it all to hell. I had pretty much presumed that most of the people were already dead.

The weakest part of film for me was not the water but the evacuation mission. In hind sight I would rather just have the squad out front of the battalion as the advanced guard and having them cutoff. But they did play the evacuation like they do on 24. Three people left in Santa Monica after the enemy shoot up the beach when landing...

Yeah, sending valuable troops to a hospital embedded in enemy territory to save some people who "might" be in a hospital struck me as a bit of a waste of manpower. I've never seen Black Hawk Down so I can't comment there, but it struck me as trying to make these guys look like brave, noble, soldiers doing something risky in order to do something mundane, like in "Saving Private Ryan" when some bat in an office realizes some woman is going to lose all her children to war so the military risks the lives of a handful of soldiers to trudge across enemy territory to save Matt Damon. (And, yes, I realize SPR was based on a true story.)

It just struck me as "trying too hard" to make us care about these characters, the military and its mission, pardon me as I get all political here but it's a problem I see a lot with the mentality people take when it comes to "our troops" in this day and age. Like they're all these brave, noble, great men whom we should admire and respect to the end of the earth. When I don't buy it.

I mean, yeah, they're brave men and they do impossible things that I could never do and I respect that but I don't feel a solider has ever died to "protect my freedom," at least no solider in service since I was born and before then you'd still have to go back 30 or 40 years. Most soldier sacrifice themselves to protect other country's peoples or enforcing our nation's political interests. You'll never convince me that if America had never gotten involved in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan then America wouldn't still be here.

So we're supposed to watch this movie and think, "Man! These are great men! Sacrificing their lives to save four people in a hospital! God Bless the military! See how passionate he is! He memorized the serial numbers of his soldiers! Hell, I can't even be bothered to memorize my own Social Security number!"

The movie would have worked better for me if we didn't have the little "side plot" of them having to go to this hospital to save people especially when it ended up only being, like, four people because then it just makes the whole expedition look pointless. Think about it, because they were so concerned about getting these few people out the base was taken out stopping the airstrike! Had it not been for our heroes and their deductions the military would've lost LA all because they wanted to save four people? Sorry, in hard eat-or-be-eaten battle situations like that I understand the concept of collateral damage.

I'm not trying to rag on the military or those in it; again, they do something I could never do but I am very tired of this "Rah! Rah! The military!" idea so many people have in them when all the military does right now is just protect our oil interests overseas or help other countries out in their battles. Noble, but has not a whole lot to do with me or my life. So such triteness makes me roll my eyes and part of me felt like I was supposed to get that out of this movie. That I was supposed feel "proud" of my military and what they do.

In a situation like our heroes were in? Absolutely.

In the real world? Right now? Not so much. Soldiers aren't fighting for my freedom right now.

Parts of this movie I felt like I was being manipulated.

Okay I will nit pick, they said Lincoln Blvd. Easy walkig distance, no need for the bus. Infact it would have been the first freeway onramp for the freeway battle further east where the interchange and bridges are.

I actually groaned and face-palmed when I heard the guy yell that the ramp was out. For some reason, part of me flashed back to "Speed" and I was afraid that they were going to try and to jump the gap.

 

[Brikar99]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

Okay I will nit pick, they said Lincoln Blvd. Easy walkig distance, no need for the bus. Infact it would have been the first freeway onramp for the freeway battle further east where the interchange and bridges are.

I actually groaned and face-palmed when I heard the guy yell that the ramp was out. For some reason, part of me flashed back to "Speed" and I was afraid that they were going to try and to jump the gap.

the way I took it, the bus was because they felt like walking or running that distance was suicide out in the open, especially with kids. The bus would give some protection and allow them to ram through things. As for the freeway ramps, I guess that's the sort of thing that only bothers locals because I've never been to Los Angeles and have no idea about any of its roads. (Though, I sympathize - when I watched 'Surrogates,' almost none of the Boston locations are correct).

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Re: BATTLE: LOS ANGELES(Film 2011) Grade/Discuss

They mentioned a line. It wasn't the entire city that was going to be bombed, just one area that was already hit and where most were dead, had fled, or needed to be evacuated.

Okay I will nit pick, they said Lincoln Blvd. Easy walkig distance, no need for the bus. Infact it would have been the first freeway onramp for the freeway battle further east where the interchange and bridges are.

As someone who isn't familiar with LA, I'm having trouble following your post. Could you make it a bit clearer? Are you saying Lincoln Bvd was a poor choice of a road?