Battle: Los Angeles: Critic Reviews

There's never a doubt who will win in the aliens versus marines battle, but the fact that it's interesting from the first frame to the last is an achievement.

Battle: Los Angeles is so inept it's exhausting.

As it lurches from Act II to Act III, "Battle: Loss Angeles" reveals itself to be a lousy movie.

After a brief introduction to the cliched characters, the battle of the title is a violent, over-amplified affair...

As Ernest Thesiger might have said: oh my dear, the noise, the extraterrestrials.

Battle takes its fight so seriously that it's hard to get behind the mission.

H.G. Wells did it better. This movie spends so much yawn-inducing time on variations of the same combat scenario that its final showdown feels rushed.

A loud, frenetic, viscerally gripping two-hour tour of duty that mostly plays fair by the rules of the genre and mostly avoids macho posturing.

Not a single arresting image is found amid the sci-fi rubble, though unintentional laughs eventually arrive.

When the mothership finally arrives, it's a clinking, clanking, clattering collection of metallic parts, as if Fred Sanford's junkyard suddenly became airborne.

Like an angry tenant bent on revenge, the movie industry has depicted the destruction of Los Angeles with staggering consistency if not a wealth of imagination.

..the real problem with this picture, shaky-cam visuals aside... is its insistent, talky, unnecessary earnestness, which adds a good fifteen minutes of flab to the picture...

If the talk had been surgically removed, leaving only the sights and sounds of combat, this could have been a striking, semiabstract display of aggressive energy; as it is, any viewer over twelve will go for the laughs.

Here's a science-fiction film that's an insult to the words "science" and "fiction," and the hyphen in between them. You want to cut it up to clean under your fingernails.

This jacked-up B-movie hybrid of "Black Hawk Down" and "War of the Worlds" is a modest but crafty triumph of tension over good sense and cliche.

As a narrative, the cartoonish Battle: Los Angeles makes the cartoonish Independence Day look as nuanced as Saving Private Ryan.

The film, constructed by people of serious talent, is designed to put you through the wringer, and that's exactly what it does. This is a total war scenario, people. Man up or stand back. Hoo-rah!

This film feels so much like a videogame your hands keep reaching for controllers -- shoot the aliens, shoot the aliens, shoot the aliens.

As it stands, Battle: Los Angeles is good dumb fun. A little less talking and a little weirder alien and it might have been something more.

Mostly, this is the cinematic equivalent of a first-person shooter game, one where the Marines possess only slightly more personality than the faceless invaders.

This silly extraterrestrial-invasion epic somehow manages the feat of making the destruction of La La Land seem tedious.

It's not new, it's not novel and it's not art. But as a popcorn movie a couple of months out of summer season, "Battle: Los Angeles" will have to do.

Me, I would rather have enjoyed a big breakfast.

Don't mean to boast, but I can suspend my disbelief as willingly as any credulous moviegoer. Yet not even an industrial crane would have helped here. Nope, Battle: Los Angeles completely defeated me.

A movie that made me wish, from the first to the last of its 116 minutes (forewarned is forearmed!), that I were at home watching Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" again instead.