Grunts.

The belief that one Marine was better than ten Slopes saw Marine squads fed in against known NVA platoons, platoons against companies, and on and on, until whole battalions found themselves pinned down and cut off.  That belief was undying, but the grunt was not, and the Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

I need you to be my little Marine. (To a 13-year old boy after the death of his father.)

Sergeant Nantz (Aaron Eckhart), Battle: LA

Everyone who knows me is fully aware that I have very simple and/or criteria for moviegoing:  aliens and explosions.* For the purposes of flexibility, elves and similar fantasy characters are considered to be equivalent to aliens. On that basis, the recent release of Battle: LA (aka Battle for Los Angeles, at least in the early previews) is an obvious gimme in terms of suitability, so off I went yesterday afternoon for a couple of hours of extra-terrestrials and fireworks.

Alas, nothing is ever that simple, and as always Plot rears its ugly head, demanding some discussion of the movie as a piece of unrealistic military propaganda.

Battle: LA is a war movie stripped to its basics: we are presented with a quick overview of a gallery of characters, all members of a squad of Marines, who are almost immediately thrust into combat with an implacable alien enemy.

In this case, the alien invaders literally come from nowhere: a meteor cloud is detected a mere four hours from impact from Earth, and the resulting coastal impacts are distinguished by deceleration, something that most meteors don't manage to pull off.  As this would suggest, they aren't actually meteors, so it's not a huge shock when it's revealed that these are really alien spacecraft staging a co-ordinated assault on planet Earth.

As the aliens emerge from the surf, they are revealed to match the standard alien invasion profile that we all know and love:  they're physically unattractive, completely merciless, have no interest in negotiating, and want our water.  Of course, as you'd expect, they're also worse shots than Imperial Stormtroopers or first generation Cylons, and are happy to leave important strategic targets virtually undefended.

Initially I had high hopes for the movie - there's a great scene where Aaron Eckhart, who plays a staff sergeant with combat experience, decoys an alien drone and destroys it single-handedly.  Upon his return to the bus being used by his squad to ferry civilians to safety, he is ashen-faced and shaking, a far cry from the standard sort of action hero one-liner followup to a life-threatening situation.  There's also a brief exchange between two of the Marines where one of them speculates that the enemy troops may be just as scared and confused as they are.

Unfortunately, these are isolated moments of realism and empathy in what quickly turns into a chest-thumping testament to the Marine mythos. Having succeeded in rescuing the civilians at the self-sacrificing cost of several of their own, the remnants of the squad leave the rescue copter to reconnoiter behind enemy lines in hopes of discovering the alien's aerial drone control center.  They succeed in finding the control center, which is astonishingly lightly defended considering that it's a crucial military target, and call in a laser-guided missile strike to disable the center and give the Air Force back control of the air. 

In an episode strongly reminiscent of a computer game challenge, the Marines must fight off the alien troops for two minutes while the missiles home in on the laser marker.  They then attack a massively superior force in a head-on assault, and drive off the presumably disheartened aliens as they retreat following the destruction of their control center.

The Marines then return to their base to receive kudos from their peers as the rest of the armed forces launch a massive assault to sweep the aliens back into the ocean. But, of course, rather than rest, the squad joins their tireless sergeant as he reloads his weapons in preparation to join the fight once again.

I have nothing but respect for people who have chosen to enter military service and risk their lives for their countries, but I think that when making that choice, they should be fully aware of the real possibilities of what that choice may cost them.  Battle: LA offers a virtually bloodless testament to the invulnerability of the Marines, but even more of a testament to the incompetence and inconsistency of their alien foe.  This movie shows that soldiers only die when they sacrifice themselves to save others, that the enemy is faceless, cowardly and stupid, and that the good guys will always win regardless of the odds facing them.

I would have loved this movie when I was sixteen. Sadly, I'm not sixteen anymore. 

- Sid

 * Anyone who knows me well knows that I also love romantic comedies but refuse to see them in commercial release because I usually end up crying at the end, soft-hearted fool for love that I am.  Frankly, it disturbs my amour propre to come out of a movie wiping tears from my eyes.