I lost the battle of “should we go?” but my extremely low expectations paid off!
Battle LA was not “blah”; it was kind of fun. It has all the artistic merits of a trip on a roller coaster. This is a movie you don’t want to arrive late for. Not that you’d have trouble following the plot or miss any witty dialogue. Every line was distinctly unmemorable. But it starts like a cat in a bath.
It would not make a good stage play. Well, possibly a musical.
No complaints about the capable cast (the demands of the script did not exceed their range), and I didn’t hear a yawn through the whole thing.
The story often lacked realism, and I don’t mean what Dr Seth Shostak of SETI recently said at “The Great Extraterrestrial Debate” for the Centre For Inquiry in Toronto, about aliens having better things to do than to wander way the hell out to this uninteresting part of the galaxy. He did in fact say that, if aliens do come all this way, we can expect to get the kind of treatment that indigenous populations often get when they are “discovered” by a technologically superior group.
No, the shortcomings I mean are, for lack of a better word, subtler than that. But I don’t want to spoil it for you by saying the kid takes it pretty well when his dad dies. …Oops.
For published film reviews, please see About the writer.
Good Evaning 