The menace comes from spindle-legged, semi-armoured, mushroom-headed, welded-on-weapons monsters the like of which we’ve seen a dozen times before, and the heroics are delivered by the sort of soldiers who were cliché as John Wayne hit The Sands of Iwo Jima let alone when Clint Eastwood stormed Heartbreak Ridge.
Liebesman isn’t interested in competing with District 9 or Monsters, though, just in trashing Los Angeles (a city of no strategic value whatsoever) and shooting aliens. So they’re not a hive mind or zombies or robots or insects and might have more complicated characters than we’re allowed to see. Later, after much computer-game style ET-blasting carnage, there's a busy skirmish between Our Side (the US Marines, hoo-rah!) and Them (Evil Alien Bastards) in which it’s easy to miss a little vignette of two aliens pulling a wounded comrade out of the line of fire. There’s one tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in Battle Los Angeles which hints at an interesting film director Jonathan Liebesman – the man who brought you the Texas Chainsaw prequel and that Tooth Fairy movie Darkness Falls – chose not to make.Įarly on, a couple of grunts wonder aloud in thudding dialogue whether the aliens they’re fighting are soldiers following orders just like them.
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