Review: Battle: Los Angeles

Battle: Los Angeles
Dir. Jonathan Liebesman
Year: 2011
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 116mins

Battle: Los Angeles is a thoroughly depressing and numbing event. You’d be forgiven for crying after witnessing it purely out of sadness for the art of cinema.

Aliens are colonising the Earth and Los Angeles is the American military’s last stand. Two hours of bombastic combat later and I think we all know who is going to come out on top, but to quote the poster for Alien vs Predator ‘Whoever wins, we lose’. We being the moviegoer, who has to sit through this endless parade of sequences designed like video game levels, nauseating handheld camerawork, soldiers screaming identical dialogue at one another and deafening sound design. If the visual effects are nice, scene after scene of grenade and gunfire between gung-ho American marines and robot invaders soon puts any visual pizazz to rest.

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Truly. To call this movie "depressing" is allowing it to get off lightly. At one point on my walk from the train station to my home I had to stop and was all but on the verge of tears. TEARS! I wouldn't let this film defeat me though and I promptly finished my walk home and wrote this review. Personally, I'm quite proud of that Alien vs Predator reference.

Truly a despicable movie. I hate every single thing about it. I even hate the marketing, which not only aims to position it as the first in a long line of terrible Black Hawk Down-meets-District 9 style lobotomies, but also alludes to a back story that is never, for one single moment, mentioned.


And then there's the main poster - or, at least, the one being used in Australia - that brought about unfair comparisons to Deep Impact. I know I am a bigger fan of Mimi Leder's asteroid-on-path-to-Earth film than most, but even leaving that film to the side for a moment, even Michael Bay's Armageddon had quiet moments, you know? Battle: Los Angeles has one quiet scene and during it, quite tellingly, I dozed off for about 30 seconds or so.


Hmmm. Writing about Battle: Los Angeles is making me sad again. Let's move on... F

Review: Rabbit Hole

Rabbit Hole

Dir. John Cameron Mitchell

Year: 2010

Aus Rating: M

Running Time: 90mins

Grief is given a hefty workout in Rabbit Hole, a searing drama that charts the parallel paths a married couple take after the death of their only child. It’s an unfair tragedy when a parent outlives their child, exemplified by the film being set nine months after four-year-old Danny’s death; you only get nine months to be excited about the imminent birth of a child, and yet the grieving never ends. Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) know they’ll never experience another day of their lives that isn’t impacted by memories of Danny’s death, but they do what they can in such a pressing situation.

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And given how much I've spoken about this movie over the past year, you probably should read it just so we can draw a line under it. I found it interesting that on one side of me at the screening earlier this week, one of my esteemed colleagues was crying and an emotional wreck once the credits rolled, and on the other side of me, yet another colleague, say laughing and doodling in her notebook. Maybe you should go and find out for yourself?