"Now you got three hours to get your ass back before those bombs drop, and make no mistake THEY WILL DROP! with... or without you"
Staff Sergeant Nantz (Aaron Eckhart) is on the verge of
retiring from the US Marines when he gets called back into action one last time
to help repel an alien attack on
This is a film with a multitude of problems which start with
the character introductions. For a start there are too many, all introduced
with a minute or two of back story. They are all stock characters which have
been seen a thousand times. We have the guy who’s getting married, the untested
Officer, the guy whose brother was killed, the guy in therapy, the guy from New
Joizey, the guy from Texas and perhaps more unusually the guy from Nigeria who enlisted
for citizenship. I couldn’t tell you any more about the characters than that
and never really cared for any of them. Later they are joined by a female Air
Force (pilot? I think) (Michelle Rodriguez) along with five civilians, three of
which are children.
The next problem is the terrible, terrible script. The plot
is basically aliens attack, we shoot them, kill mother ship, yey! It’s been
used hundreds of times and there is absolutely nothing new here. We learn very
little about the aliens except that they like water. The dialogue is shockingly
bad. Every minutiae of the plot is explained in a way that a cat with learning
difficulties could understand what’s going on. Phrases such as “This is not a
drill” (really?) and “They’re gone, they’re all gone” are banded about and
there are far too many whoops for my liking. From the opening scene when Eckhart
exclaims that “I’ve got my twenty, I know when to get out” I thought to myself ‘oh
for fuck’s sake, here we go. It’s the old cop on the last day of the job
routine and wait, his commanding officer is a bit useless. Whoever will save
the day?’
The plot has many inconsistencies, problems and holes. I
could go on for pages but the things that annoyed me the most included the fact
that Eckhart and co were sent in to a Police Station to extract the five
remaining civilians in Santa Monica. Five? Just five in the whole city, and
they happen to be in the same place? Another annoyance was that the aliens
introduced a powerful new weapon about halfway through. Why didn’t they just use
it from the start? The Marines often only reloaded their gun immediately before
a battle, rather than after the last one and the whole plot comes down to
finding the mother ship, after which “we won, we won!” is shouted by a Marine. It’s
just ridiculous. While ridiculous isn’t always bad, the fact that I was
noticing so many problems indicates that I wasn’t involved or enjoying myself.
I actually felt quite bored all the way through and checked how long was left
at least three times.
The CGI is quite good in places but is patchy overall. The
over reliance on it also made things hard to follow. There were so many
explosions happening all over the place that I couldn’t keep on top of who was
where or why. Unlike Black Hawk Down where
you get an understanding of where the characters are and where they’re heading,
here you just get the sense that they’re somewhere on a street, shooting at
something. The creature design isn’t very good either. There is so little focus
on them that you never get a sense of who they are or what they are like.
The acting isn’t actually too bad and Aaron Eckhart does a
surprisingly good job. Adetokumboh
McCormack and Jim Parrack also stand out. Most of the performances are spoiled
though by clunky, cheesy dialogue.
It seems obvious
that this film is trying to cash in on the success of the likes of Call of Duty. The squad based dynamic is
added to with an enormous amount of first person and cross hair camera work.
The whole film is like watching someone play a video game only without some
twelve year old from Minnesota
3/10
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