Battle: Los Angeles

[Surlyboi]

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

[Typhon]

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.

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.

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).

[Ghambit]

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.

[Ginaz]

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.

[Merusk]

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

[Hoax]

Will Smith free makes it sound not that good.

[Ghambit]

Just got back from this flick.

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

[fuser]

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.

[Merusk]

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. 

[fuser]

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.

[Ginaz]

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.

[LK]

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.

[devildog]

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.

[Nerf]

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.

[climbjtree]

In general , Marines can check out a variety of weapons as long as they can carry them and are trained on them.

Is that how it works? Really? 

[Yegolev]

[Comstar]

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. 

[UnSub]

In general , Marines can check out a variety of weapons as long as they can carry them and are trained on them.

Is that how it works? Really? 

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

[Draegan]

This moving was pretty terrible and boring.

[Teleku]

This moving was pretty terrible and boring.

Yeah, I hate moving as well.

[Arthur_Parker]

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.

[Ratman_tf]

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.

[Logain]

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.

[Sheepherder]

That's what Star Wars is for.