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Warred to Tears

Having grown up with the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films ("Airplane", "The Naked Gun", the highly underappreciated Val Kilmer tour de farce, "Top Secret"), I was under the impression that certain tried-and-true disaster movie cliches had been happily put to rest. You know, the "go on without me"/"damn it, he's a good soldier"/"get me the Sarge!" school of screenwriting. Judging from the unforgivably subpar dialogue and plotting in the alien invasion flick, "Battle: Los Angeles", there may be a new generation of filmmakers that needs a refresher course.

The opening moments of "Battle" feel like a cross between "District 9" and "Black Hawk Down" by way of "Aliens" with the score from "Top Gun". And, indeed, the script by Christopher Bertolini ("The General's Daughter") cribs from a variety of sources, of varying degrees of quality. As U.S. Marines pile into a helicopter geared for battle, the omnipresent CNN voices inform us that meteors have hit the Earth outside twenty major cities. But are they really meteors? Well, duh. Unlike "Independence Day", perhaps this film's greatest "inspiration", little time is spent on the friend-or-for question. These aliens come out swinging (er, shooting) in what one character-actor calls "a textbook invasion strategy". Even that textbook would be more interesting than what follows.

After that noisy and overly-handheld opening, the filmmakers then pull the old "24 hours earlier" card - though it's winkingly phrased, "Invasion minus 24 hours". Here we meet Staff Sargent Nantz (Aaron Eckhart, channeling Kiefer Sutherland's "24" voice), who (I'm not kidding) is days from retirement. It seems Nantz lost some men on his last tour of duty and he's been unable to shake the guilt. No sooner is he handed his walking-papers than he's re-recruited to lead a regiment (cue Pacino's "Just when I thought I was out...") to battle these unearthly intruders. The remainder of his team is quickly established via some perfunctory, sub-Michael Bay-quality exposition involving Skype, a virgin and a game of golf.

Once the film returns from its 24-hour detour, Nantz' team is sent in search of a missing group of civilians trapped in a section of Santa Monica which is soon going to be bombed off the map. So there's a lot of skulking around alleys, very noisy gunfire, and, again, handheld camera. Meanwhile, elsewhere on Earth, one imagines a much more interesting movie taking place.

When the aliens are finally revealed, they have the computer-generated look of the Cylons from the recent "Battlestar Galactica" series. But not quite as good. Like "Independence Day", and so many other post-"Alien" films, not much thought was given towards making the invaders - and therefore the movie - interesting. The same can be said for the human characters who are given only the slightest bit of depth, culminating in an excruciating "he was a good soldier" scene delivered by poor Mr. Eckhart.

After a string of quality films ("Thank You for Smoking", "The Dark Knight", "Rabbit Hole"), it's unclear what made Mr. Eckhart fall back on the same impulses that made him sign on to "The Core" all those years ago. Unless, of course, the script for "Battle: Los Angeles" was written with irony and, in fact, the filmmakers were attempting to write an extremely loud, big-budget parody of alien invasion movies. In which case, mission: accomplished.