f13.net

More alien invasion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORb3zC8z94w (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORb3zC8z94w)

Liking the look of this so far but have some reservations (little girl in jeopardy? Oh noes! :ye_gods: )

I like the look and feel, but with a year to go I'm not going to get particularly excited yet.

US date - it's coming out in March (25th in the UK).  Yes, still 4 months away but trailer came out today.

The IMDB page has a different title - it's been renamed to "World Invasion: Battle LA."

Bah, y'all and your silly system of dates.

Re-watching the trailer I get a bit of District 9 vibe, which isn't a bad thing

Oo I was hoping someone would start a thread on this. The most I've heard about this movie is Sony filing suit against the Strause Bros. for cribbing ideas. (The Strause Brothers did some primary effects on this flick while simultaneously creating Skyline). The trailer was released today rather than down the road in order to steal some thunder from Skyline. Considering how much money Sony already has invested, I don't see why they didn't start weeks ago when the bulk of the Skyline adds started pooping up.

The only thing that was interesting to me was the green MPAA thing saying it was approved for "Appropriate Audiences" What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Appropriate to the rating of the movie that the trailer is meant to precede. Basically it means the trailer might not be rated G.

Black hawk down with aliens! g
(that's the vibe I got)

Sony is apperently suing the makers of Skyline (who did the special effects for both movies) for stealing the idea for their movie from this one, and possibly harming sales by shoving their movie out first.  :oh_i_see:

Or course skyline cost 10 million, this cost 100million plus.

Thank you for reading the post 4 up the page Sir T, and reposting it for us  :raspberry:

You're very welcome.  :awesome_for_real:

Invasion?  We'll be OK, we have those four genius nerds that live in Pasadena to protect us!

"You're in my spot." (fires nuclear-tipped rocket launcher)

The movie was going to be released this year, but rumor is it got delayed because it's a gigantic turd.

Bollocks. It's never been slated to be released this year.

When has a movie ever been delayed because it was a giant turd?

New trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_pAsPPDdC8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_pAsPPDdC8)

The Wolfman.

Often enough that delaying release is seen as lack of faith in the film quality. It might be that test screenings got incredibly negative responses, so they've sent the film back for a re-edit, or it could see the film pushed back to an 'emptier' time of the year when it might stand out better.

Every now and again a film is pushed back if it is seen as fantastic and would have a better chance to make money / win an Oscar in a different time period, but that tends to be the exception.

So far it still looks like good stupid brainless fun.

Though if your aim is to wipe out the indigenous population for resources, I'm pretty sure you'd just fly over cities and drop WMD's instead of launching a block by block invasion.  But then it wouldn't be any fun.   :awesome_for_real:

No matter how crap the movie is, that is a very effective trailer.

I'll watch that.

The line after the bit about wiping out the indigenous population goes "Right now, we are being colonized". That suggests to me that the guy speaking agrees with you and the implicit conclusion is that they're not after resources.

But, it's a trailer and there's no context for that dialogue.

Anyway, don't care - the trailers so far have sold it to me and I'll go see it. I fully expect the third act to be a total cop out as with 95% of all invasion films but if it doesn't, all the better.


This was pushed back three weeks from Feb 18th to March 11th and probably for marketing purposes.  Reason? 0311 is the USMC code for infantry riflemen.

Also, it's easier to Morph.

You know, actually, nobody wipes out indigenous populations when they're after resources. Because you need someone to labor to extract the resources, and generally you haven't brought enough of your own people with you to do that or even enough of your own machinery. Because transporting that amount of labor or resources is expensive most of the time. When you do transport people, it's either because you've got some kind of weird ideological thing going (convicts to Australia) or because there's an unusual affordance in the environment + you have a deranged indifference to suffering (Africans across the Atlantic along the trade wind 'conveyor belt').

When you wipe out indigenous populations, it's: a) because you did it by accident, a la smallpox and Native Americans; b) because you're genocidal lunatics who kill for ideological reasons even if it's against your economic interests; c) because you're trying to intimidate the survivors into knuckling under to your imperial or authoritarian rule.

Be interesting if someone would actually do an SF alien-invasion movie that was actually serious about "right now we're being colonized". District 9 was about as close as we've seen though in reverse. Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis books were one of the best treatments of what colonization-by-aliens that wasn't the equivalent of the Russians occupying the US in "Red Dawn" might actually be like.

(http://www.reallyfabcards.com/media/product_images_L/Morph_morph_L.jpg)

Why are the aliens resurrecting Megatron in Los Angeles?  :why_so_serious:

Very anime, looks like good blow up fun.  I'm in.

Tell that to the orang-utangs.

The hell you say. I still want to see Earth carpet-nuke the Na'vi.  :why_so_serious:

But at least the scenario in Avatar was sort of worth kicking around as nerd debate material. The average Independence Day type of movie pretty much requires the aliens to come down and blatantly throw the fight in laughable fashion. You know, sending down little fighter ships to get in dogfights instead of... say... nuking every large military base on the planet from orbit, then nuking one randomly-selected city per hour until everyone surrenders.

Fuck that noise, nukes are expensive.

Asteroids on the other hand, are cheap and plentiful.

Well, exactly. You arrive at a planet of (to you) aliens. You've come a long way. For some reason, it seems to you to be important to kill everything on the planet, or at least the local sentients. You're that kind of species: you like burning ants with a magnifying glass and then pouring Drano down their anthill when the fun of burning them one by one gets old. So maybe you send a couple of WTFHELP monsters or ships or something down to burn a few ants, and maybe the sentients get lucky and kill a few of them. It happens: mean kids that burn ants sometimes get bitten by a couple of them. Little ouchies and all that. But after the fun gets old, just throw some rocks down from orbit or something. It's not like the local sentients can project any force at all into their upper atmosphere or low orbit. Even if you're interested in resources that you can extract with your magic technology and no organic labor, what resources that you need are you not going to be able to get after 5-6 major asteroid strikes? Farmed food, I guess, but if you need to resupply that, a) you couldn't have travelled interstellar distances anyway and b) then don't kill the local primitives. Unless you're looking to raid supermarkets after the apocalypse.

Say, that would make for a good genre mashup: zombie apocalypse + stranded aliens who need supplies from abandoned human stores and infrastructure.

And asteroids don't leave the impact point radioactive.

I have comfort in the fact that it could NEVER be as bad as Skyline. The bar has been set so low anything could surpass it.

Really I can't think of much that Earth would have to offer to any marauding aliens capable of getting here, except maybe the old standby of lebensraum. Even that's debatable. Movies always drastically underrate the challenge associated with not just cheating the speed of light, but doing it so well that crossing tens or hundreds of trillions of miles in massive cargo-laden ships becomes economically worthwhile.

Anyone who can expect to get here in a reasonable timeframe, steal all our gold or whatever, load it into ships large enough to hold it all, and get home in an equally reasonable period of time would probably find it easier to just suck hydrogen out of the nearest star and synthesize it into whatever they want.

And if anyone that advanced did want to come fuck with us, the invasion would make "modern military with nuclear weapons versus naked cavemen" look like a fair fight.

I don't know, I always thought it would be funny if there was an alien invasion where, after landing, they ran out of the ships waving clubs at us.  Because, due to a religious decree thats held for thousands of years, its heretical to fight with anything other than a blunt club.  This isn't a problem because everybody follows this religion, and they just assume everybody else does.  Considering the religious stupidity I see here on earth, I could actually imagine that happening.   :awesome_for_real:

But yeah, your right, theres really no physical elements that earth has that would make it worth fighting over, that they couldn't just get from some nearby uninhabited rock.  The only thing we have thats special is plants/life.  So in the event of an invasion, thats what they'd be coming for ("men, at long last we've found more land to grow grapefruits.  Order the attack!")

I'd be down with the old standby of lesbians.

The only scenario that I've been able to think of is where the other species' planet has become uninhabitable and we happen to be one of the nearest planets that looks like it's capable of supporting life.  So, they don't have unlimited resources, they have brought everything with them, and they don't want to fuck up the planetary eco-system.  If you want to make it a close fight you postulate that they didn't have a great deal of time to prepare and the trip has been hard on them.  Actually, that's kind of an interesting scenario.

Other than that or some odd psychology the only reason to come here is to collect biological specimens - and I would think they'd be able to do that surreptitiously (i.e. no invasion).

Any concensus on this thing yet?  Thinking about seeing it tonite.
Is holding its own on RT with the audience and tanking with the critics.  Most of the time this means it's a pretty damned good action flick.

I saw it today.  Great action flick with LOTS of cliches.  Think Independence Day v.2.0 only Will Smith free with less comedy and more ground action.

So there's an equally stupid Deus Ex moment involving miracle technology? (And here I thought Macs were "unhackable"  :awesome_for_real:)

Will Smith free makes it sound not that good.

Just got back from this flick.

Independence Day in all honesty was a better all-around movie, as was Blackhawk Down.

I felt like it was one long Marines recruiting video. Alas an action film clocking in at over two hours is crazy as they stuffed it with so much backstory that was left open ended. The close up shaky-cam was in full effect for the movie also.

Are you posting on other sites Fuser?  I saw the exact same recruiting vid criticism elsewhere. How odd.

Sounds like one I'll give a pass to until netflix streaming in 6-9 months. 

Nope, only other place is SA time to time but nothing on movie threads.

As others have mentioned, there was way too many cliches and unnecessary melodrama as well as almost being a recruitment movie for the marines.  It also probably had the weakest alien invasion force in movie history.  Fairly good action movie, just don't expect much else.

This movie is a god damn waste of time and viewing it has made me angry at everyone and everything ever ever ever.

What the hell is it with people's fascination and need to point at a bad guy and not have to fucking think about them as nothing more than a force of pure evil that must be stopped? I'm kinda glad in a way that I saw this movie because it's textbook melodrama and made me realize how fucking much I hate melodrama. That's the pure evil I'll point to and want to start rooting around in its innards looking for a weak point.

To say this movie was a Marine recruiting video is bad form. No Marine in his right mind would call this a good action movie. I try not to expect too much from the military realism side of things, but this was just retarded. Everyone is carrying an m-16. No one has a sniper rifle, s.a.w. or anything really besides m-16s and we're fighting aliens? Bull shit. In general , Marines can check out a variety of weapons as long as they can carry them and are trained on them. Yea, i asked once, and no one seems to know where the flamethrowers are stored. Anyway, i thought that was a bit retarded. Also, The Iraqi military figured out to leave the planes at home when we started swatting them out of the air out of hand, but i guess we didn't quite figure that out ourselves versus the aliens.

A lot of people said Aaron was the saving Grace of the movie, but i can't even agree with that. I thought he was horrible. I'm not sure if it was him, the script, the directing, or a mix of all, but it wasn't good. In my top 10 military action flick heroes, he wouldn't crack into the list. Maybe he makes the top 100. The plot seems like it should have been pretty straightforward, but somehow they mess it up by starting to get you interested in a character, but never really finishing the explanation and leaving you hanging with a half-assed character you aren't really invested in.

I thought it was pretty bad, even as just an action flick. I honestly thought Independence Day was a far better movie. This was about as big a letdown for me as the latest Robin Hood was. Whoever was responsible for this mess needs to go hang out with the funcom crew.

Eh, better than most.  All of the m16s had acogs/eotechs, there were no unlimited round magazines, and they made a point to bring up the important of aimed fire with the little alien dissection bit.

I'm positive I saw a few SAWs in there as well, but 1/2 of the squad got wiped out pretty early on, so it likely just got left behind.
As for sniper rifles, are you pissed that no one was toting around an M14, or do you expect a ground team doing search and rescue to lug around a fucking M82?

The movie had it's problems, but it had some of the best weapons/weapon handling I've seen come out of hollywood in a long fucking time.

Is that how it works? Really?  :oh_i_see:

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/sulu_knows.jpg)

I thought it was a good Alien Invasion movie. Not as epic as ID4, but it wasn't supposed to be, and it did the job it was supposed to. It was a nice different perspective on it. It was better than skyline.

They missed out on making the civilians more interesting - the only time we saw the 3 children were when they were screaming or crying. That was a mistake. And the last 10 minutes after the climax was way overdone and let the rest of the movie down - it was clearly a homage to ID4 and it was out of place.

I thought the reason given for the aliens invading was fine- it's less than a day after and anything you would hear on a cable network would be absolute rubbish. I did find it unrealistic the amount of power that LA kept running after an invasion, what with all the street lights apparently still working.

A SAW was used throughout the movie, up to the freeway, I don't see how you could have missed it.

I'm sure there was a deliberate shout out to Half Life 2 at the last battle - I kept expecting a Strider to show up.

I'd say it's worth seeing - there's a lot of computer games about an Alien Invasion from the grunts eye view - this is the movie version and it's not a bad one. 

It's always a race to see who gets to the Hammer of Dawn first.

This moving was pretty terrible and boring.

Yeah, I hate moving as well.

Apart from the shaky camera work I liked it, I wish more movies would remember that if the plot has to be stupid, then make it simple & stupid not complicated & stupid.

Just saw this on DVD last night.

Fucking water. Jesus christ. I could dismiss the first announcer as a retarted newsguy, but the second announcer spelled it out that they were sucking up all the seawater to power their spaceships.
I guess they're really impatient aliens who just can't wait for a comet to melt in their cargo hold.

Aside from that terrible nonsense, it was a fun action movie with lots of cheese. I liked it for that.

Watched this on DVD tonight. I thought it was entertaining and didn't feel the time was wasted. It must be tough for people who can't turn their overly critical brains off for a couple hours and just enjoy all of the obligatory epic man moments movies like this are filled with.

That's what Star Wars is for.