BATTLE: LOS ANGELES

Sitting through this directionless, incoherent and, ultimately, boring sci-fi actioner is very much like spending two hours watching someone else play a video game.

There’s a lot of shooting, stuff blowing up, frenetic editing (frenediting?) and that shaky, hand-held camerawork that always leaves me with a big headache by film’s end. Woefully absent are things like story, character, logic and a point.

Directed by Jonathan Liebesman, Battle’s plot is thin at best: aliens invade Earth and a bunch of U.S. Marines in California shoot at them. That’s pretty much it. Seriously. To be fair, the film starts off with some promise, as mysterious clusters of “meteors” crash into the waters off the coasts of major cities worldwide and everybody scrambles to figure out what’s happening. But, very soon after, it devolves into a standard-issue, chaotic shoot-‘em’up where very little actually happens.

Recently discharged Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart) is called back to duty and dumped into a platoon of comparatively inexperienced recruits, none of whom (save for Air Force straggler Michelle Rodriguez and bespectacled rapper Ne-Yo) are remotely identifiable because they’re never onscreen for more than two seconds at a time. They’re sent on a reconnaissance mission to an abandoned police station where, it’s rumored, humans (including Bridget Moynahan and Michael Peña) are hiding and awaiting rescue. The entire movie is essentially the Marines blasting their way towards the police station, and then blasting their way out.

The dialogue, what there is of it, is leaden and clichéd, as if cherry-picked from countless war movies that came before. I fully realize this isn’t the type of film where anyone’s going to deliver any lengthy profundities, but how long could the screenplay have been when the only words spoken are random staccato outbursts in between what feels like epic stretches of dizzying (in a bad way) camera work and repetitive battle sequences?

The aliens themselves are still a mystery to me because, like their human counterparts, they’re never onscreen long enough for the audience to actually get a good look at them. At first, they seemed almost amphibian. Then robotic. Then an amalgam of both. Unfortunately, they (as CGI creations) look entirely fake and don’t appear to possess any real weight (think: the drone armies of the Star Wars sequels), and the fact that the filmmakers never really show them in close-up made it seem like they were purposely trying to mask the sub-par effects.

At first glance, Battle: Los Angeles looks like a summer blockbuster dropped into the spring schedule. Only after seeing it do you realize why it’s being released in the cinematic desert of March and not, say, the high-concept buffet of July: it isn’t very good.