After reading a fair amount of pretentious and negative reviews about Battle: LA I was quite sceptical about going to see it. Films of this nature regularly get panned by critics. Being someone who can take or leave alien based, end of the world-esque movies you can imagine that I was going into the theatre thinking I knew exactly how this would work out for me.
The film launches straight into the action with a helicopter full of marines being attacked by an unknown enemy, in the background we see mass destruction. These scenes of terror are then switched to 24 hours into the past, showing us a happier Los Angeles before the attack.
From here, we follow a group of marines in their mission to rescue civilians from an area of LA that has been attacked and invaded before it is bombed in an attempt to wipe out the enemy.
Cynical views of the way this film is flashed back suggest that it is a vain attempt to create character development. I however disagree. I think character development is extremely difficult to create in action films, and often it flops spectacularly, but in my personal opinion, I don't think that is the case here. Now, I am not saying the character development matches up to that of a Drama genre film, for example, but for an action film I think this is a cracking effort. As for opinions that ram down your throat that you will not care about characters being killed off and you do not care about any character relationships, I also disagree.
Throughout the whole 116 minutes of this film, the tension created was incredibly intense and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.
It shot to first place in it's first weekend at the US box office taking an extremely impressive $36m and in no way is this a surprise after having seen it.
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