Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Jason watches BATTLE LOS ANGELES

Quick punctuation point. Although advertisements list it as BATTLE: LOS ANGELES, the actual title credit in the movie does not have a colon. So I'm not using it.

Anyway, I really didn't have much interest in this movie, and then two separate friends whose movie opinions I trust recommended it. And I was pleasantly surprised. It's relentless, throwing you right in the battle from the very beginning. It's also not at all about the alien invaders, it's about the soldiers. In fact, it's hero worship of Marines, especially the total badass played by Aaron Eckhart. And in a way that's kind of brilliant. Make a movie about the experience of soldiers in any real war, and the audience will be torn between admiration (at least, I hope we all feel admiration) for the soldiers who volunteer for such a difficult, dangerous job and your political views on the war. Instead it's a movie about the soldier's experience in the extreme case of an absolute existential war. The only people who could be against this fictional war would be people who want all humanity wiped off the face of the earth.

But anyway, I digress. It's a surprisingly good movie, and I'll leave it at that.

Running Time: 116 minutes
My Total Minutes: 230,842

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