Movie Review, Battle for L.A.

Pointlessly formulaic, but fun, lots of explosions and battles as promised.

I propose, however, that one should view the movie not from the perspective of our heroes, but rather from the perspective of the aliens.  This is hard to do: in classic Jaws style, you don't really see the aliens until halfway through the movie.  But I extrapolate that their thought processes are much more fascinating than those of the screen-hogging humans.

The aliens, light-years away, view the Earth.  "Look at them," says one, "the U.S. is very interesting.  None of the rest of the world is as good.  They have these wonderful armies and tanks and missiles, all working like an elegant nervous system, ready to sweep in, to do or die!"

"Yes," says an other alien, "with lots of explosions.  But its kind of sad.  Whenever they invade a country these days, they have to muck about with avoiding 'civilian casualties, upholding conventions, and building infrastructure.  It's ridiculous, grown-up stuff.  What they need is a wave of unequivocally evil baddies... like back in WWII."

"You want the U.S. to invade Italy?" the third alien comes in, just having finished a good day of snarling and creeping through underbrush. 

The alien law-student couldn't help joining the argument.  "No, no, no.  What they need is an unquestionable moral imperative; they need to be invaded, not invade!"

"Canadians sweeping down from the border, red-coated mounties with shining battle-lances?" the group perked up their sensory tentacles at this. 

But another alien, who was busily flipping through Facebook on his  black-shelled, evil-looking personal computer, disagreed, "No again!  You're thinking far too old-school.   Lances?  What rubbish: what we want is big waves of troops slamming into eachother, with rumbling armoured vehicles and lots of shots and explosions."

"That would be awesome!" all cried, "I wish I could be there to see it!" Then it got suddenly quiet.

The aliens would have stroked their beards, had they possessed any that were on their faces and not in glass jars.  "What if..."

And that crystallizing moment happened.  With one accord, a whole race of people gathered their spaceships together and started building.  "Robot mechs that shoot orange explodey rays!" they ordered.

"Not at first, you've got to pace it.  First we'll crash land in the ocean and then we'll loom up out of the see and shoot smaller and slightly less-accurate explodey things!"  This suggestion was greeted with great enthusiasm.

They worked it all out.  Except for how the heroic humans would win the day.  "They're the underdogs, they have to win.  We need some mechanism whereby their whole army combined can't beat us, but a scrappy force of rookies with big hearts can sneak in behind our lines and blow something up that will foil our invasion."

"Yes, yes!" piped in the expert roboticist, "like the droid control ship from Star Wars.  Why would anybody make their whole army dependent on one computer?"

The others scoffed, "oh, don't go there.  Next you'll be asking why, if we wanted to invade the U.S., we wouldn't just hang out in orbit dropping bombs until they had no more soldiers left."

The hyperspace engineer added, "or worse yet, you'll start asking why we'd even bother to invade it: what could a space-faring society possibly want to conquor the U.S. for?"

"Because it'll be exciting!" they all cried.

An alien movie-critic heard the conversation and lumbered forward, "yes, but that's not believable.  What we need is some kind of nefarious motivation!"

"Let's threaten to eat their brains!" someone shouted.

"Wait, no: we might actually have to do it a few times to establish that, gross.  Can you imagine how disgusting that would taste... let's just say we're going to steal their water.  They always harp on and on about how much ocean they have.  Like that was so special, Rigel 9 is just a big ball of it: not even any core."

"I dunno - they're worried about their ocean getting to high as it is. Do you think they'd just let us if we started sucking it all up?"  There was a quick, snarled debate.  But in the end, nobody wanted to be the first to put yucky human-brain in their mouth.  So stealing water won the day as the motive.

As expected, the Marines were thrilled at the aliens' generosity.  The aliens made a big show of flying out of dark corners, blasting around the enemy to look scary but rarely hitting anyone.  They also brought in an impressive array of robots and mechs and scary machinery.  And when a scrappy team of marines crawled in deep behind their lines to blow up their command ship, the aliens duly kept the tension up until the very end, forgetting that they had the big robots and explodey missiles and returning to street-to-street fighting.

All in all, the aliens put in a lot of effort, even bothering to land a few troops around other cities over the globe so that when the Marines prevailed, they saved the world and not only the U.S. 

I'm sure a few months after the closing credits the aliens got bored and teleported away to put themselves back together and recount stories.  "Did you see me scare that one guy?  I was all like 'blarrrrg!' and I jumped from the roof down to that dumpster."

"That's nothing," another would say, "did you see me fly out of that swimming pool?  That guy nearly wet his pants."

"Shot you like fifty times, though."

"Yeah, they were pretty cool.  I love it when they shout 'cover your six' and 'go, go, go!' like that.  It sounds so military-y."

"Yeah," he said, "maybe we should go back there and do the east coast next time!"

So the movie closes and the heroes learn to work together and never stop believing in themselves, no matter how much the odds are against them.  Especially if the aliens have a sufficiently dedicated sense of drama."