Battle Los Angeles - 1 smile

If you don’t have a problem with shaky cams (i.e., hand-held cameras), then you’ll like “Battle Los Angeles” more than I did. But the ‘you are there’ perspective that director Jonathan Liebesman employs had me closing my eyes for most of this movie. So I had to rely on my sense of sound to determine what was happening and I heard a lot of shooting, explosions, shouting, and some dialogue. And ‘watching’ a movie this way gets tiresome long before the movie ends. Plus I couldn’t tell who was who, the soldiers being pretty much interchangeable with the exception of Aaron Eckhart. Here’s the gist of the story: Aliens are invading Earth for its water and Los Angeles becomes the last stand for mankind. It’s up to a Marine staff sergeant (Eckhart) and his new platoon to stop them. The story isn’t new; we saw it in Independence Day without the shaky cams. I had a huge headache by the time this movie ended. 3/11/11