"To me the heart of a great war movie lies not with the firefights, realistic tactics and jargon, or earth-shattering kabooms; but with the very real human reaction to combat."
And that would be your first mistake.
See, I got a severe case of Hype Aversion from the blatantly button-pushing trailers that made the movie seem like Generation Kill With Aliens! So I haven't seen it. But are you saying the movie would have been better if it had just embraced the camp (a la Independence Day) instead of trying for something thoughtful?
Also, poor Michelle Rodriguez. Her typecast is now set in concrete.
Screaming along at mach .2 with my hair on fire.
Well, it's hard to say if it would be better or not, but it would have been easier to swallow the canned characterization. As everything else is fairly well done, it makes the utterly generic soldiers stick out like a sore thumb. The audience's introductions to these characters are so cliche that it almost seems like a parody, and none of it really matters because most of them only get one or two throw-away lines of That Makes Me Feel Angry. One particularly egregious moment came at what was supposed to be the emotional climax of the movie, but just sent the audience into fits of laughter. Still, an enjoyable movie if you can forget about that stuff.
You should read Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It is quite frankly the best alien invasion story ever written.
I think this is a far more accurate type of war movie than Saving Private Ryan or We Were Soldiers. It doesn't dwell on the emotions or even the characters involved, because all that - as in real life - becomes secondary to the task at hand. The Marines have the objective of thwarting an alien invasion and do so. The battle of Fallujah didn't offer the Marines many chances to stop and reflect on the combat and its affects on them because they were there to do a job. The only concern they had was how to do it.
This movie is that with aliens.
I agree with the review to an extent. B:LA lacks any heart whatsoever. That is its biggest issue. Even in the darkest war movies, you tend to get a good joke, or a favourite character at some point. Which is fairly true to real life (yes soldiers do tell jokes, yes sometimes funny things happen, yes conflict can bring out colourful, larger than life characters). In this, there is only really one character arc - Eckhart trying to get over some dead soldiers. There is no other character provided to go along with, so if you don't engage with the Ekhart arc (I didn't; too cliché) you have to sit through the same, constant misery none stop.
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Enjoyable, Despite the Humans
The director stated that he set out to make a war movie with touches of sci-fi, rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, by that set of parameters, I feel the movie falls short of its potential. Now, before I explain myself, know that I was thoroughly entertained and would recommend that people see it. It was a good movie, but it could have been so much more.
Now as I said, they went out to make a war movie, and without the trappings of the science fiction elements, they did not succeed. To me the heart of a great war movie lies not with the firefights, realistic tactics and jargon, or earth-shattering kabooms; but with the very real human reaction to combat. The emotional toll that violence takes on a person needs to be evident with each character and how they deal with it in different ways. War movies are essentially character studies of people placed under the most extreme conditions imaginable and asking if their actions are justified.
Battle Los Angeles does not provoke those questions. Viewers have said that it is possible to overlook the fact that the Marines are a Storm Of Cliches and I agree with them. But the fact remains that they are as flat as cardboard. Aside from Aaron Eckhart's character (and Michelle Rodriguez, but only because she's playing the same character for the billionth time) the only thing I could tell you about the other Marines is that one wore glasses and another had a moustache. Yes, I remember their backstories, since they're the same backstories given to every other disposable grunt in B-movies, and I honestly could not match an a character to their history if pressed. I asked myself if I would have found the movie as enjoyable if, instead of aliens in LA, they were fighting insurgents in Iraq, or Koreans in Pyongyang, or Germans in Normandy. The answer, regrettably, is no.
My hat is off to the graphics department for creating an immersive post-apocalyptic wasteland and the aliens themselves were thankfully original. Also, the military advisors deserve credit for staging believable battles and adding hints of tactical intelligence to the invaders that makes them a credible threat. If you like a knock-down drag-out fight with humanity struggling for survival, this is your movie. Hell, that's why I love Independence Day. But I can't shake the feeling they were trying for something more than that here.