Battle: Los Angeles is a fun alien invasion yarn based on a typically bad premise and a plot centered on poor logic. The combat feels realistic, the acting is decent enough and the visual effects are great. But the key sticking point, as always in this sub-genre, is why the aliens go to all the expense and trouble of travelling to and invading Earth.
News commentators reveal the invaders want Earth’s water, but even leaving aside the stupidity of that premise* there’s still no good reason for the aliens to invade dozens of humanity’s coastal cities. Why not just quietly set up shop sucking water in some remote ocean location? And if they’re paranoid xenophobes with crazed anxiety that won’t let them tolerate being on the same planet with live humans, wouldn’t it be vastly more efficient to just nuke all those human cities instead of occupying them via gritty house to house combat? The aliens seem to be intent on genocide, judging by their treatment of helpless civilians, so why bother bringing the huge and expensive invasion force? If it’s the radiation they don’t like, they could drop medium-sized asteroids for all the bang of a nuke but not radioactive mess. The heart of this film is the realistic urban combat that serves as a crucible for testing the metal of a variety of characters, but by any logical measure that combat makes no sense at all.
The plot winds up on sketchy grounds too. The hero’s deal a devastating tactical blow to the invaders, but only because these aliens are improbably stupid. They have mastered the olympian engineering and logistics required to bring to Earth, across billions of miles of deep space, an army large enough to simultaneously invade every major coastal city, but they have yet to grasp the all too practical concept of redundant command and control. In each battle zone the aliens control their air superiority drones with a single massive C & C vehicle hidden inside the combat zone itself.
Really? So exactly how is this all-in-one-basket tactical vulnerability necessary? Why not put a thousand redundant C & C satellites in orbit instead? They came from space after all, so they must understand the concept of a communication satellite, right? But if not, then why not park fifty little C & C vehicles in a randomly dispersed pattern offshore from each target city? It’s idiotic to bring only one to each battle and to keep it in such a vulnerable place.
The obvious answer to any of these questions is there would be no movie if sensible logic were taken into account by the writers. Or at least it would be a very different kind of movie than one of gritty house to house combat. Overall Battle: Los Angeles was definitely fun to watch. But as a reasonably intelligent sci-fi fan I always have trouble getting past this sort of lazy story telling.
Rating: 2.25/5.0 stars
*Water is by all observational evidence extremely common in the universe. Stealing ours is an utterly ridiculous premise for alien invasion.