“Battle: Los Angeles” or why Aliens Should Have Better Military Technology

(SPOILER ALERT)

I went to see “Battle: Los Angeles” Saturday night with a friend of mine, and I actually liked it for the most part.  I don’t want people to think that I am necessarily complaining about the film itself.  The film itself was good.  It portrayed what could possibly happen when aliens invade and how humans would possibly react to them.  It wasn’t funny stuff.

The movie started out really fast and made you feel sympathy for the soldiers. This is where I thought the film was really good.  It was somewhat of a social commentary on how soldiers lose people in wars and how they feel about it.

The staff sergeant lost a bunch of his men and his soldiers were all upset about him, but they still had to follow orders from him since he was the one that was in charge.  You had to feel sorry for him.

Over time you saw a bonding between soldiers over sympathy for each other.  One soldier wished to see his wife back home, and another soldier wished to get married to his girlfriend.  Some people didn’t even make it out alive.  In one scene a helicopter went up full of people in it and they all blew up.  They thought all hope was lost.  It was rumored that the aliens wanted to be on Earth for their water.

This is where I think everything went wrong in the film. I came to the film hoping to see humans being wiped out but soon the film revealed just how primitive the aliens were.

The staff sergeant discovered that the aliens could only see or hear people based on the electronic signals that they carried.  As soon as they discovered this fact, they told everyone to turn off their cell-phones and radios.  At that point in time—the mass slaughter seemed to just stop all and the aliens were left looking really dumb.  These aliens could only see based on electrical signals.

What kind of aliens are that dumb?  On top of that, the staff sergeant was able to lure an alien ship over by a radio frequency and blow it up with ONE SINGLE GRENADE!  Most alien ships can withstand tons of human fire (and resistance is usually futile).  But no, one single grenade can kill an alien ship.

To make matters worse, the aliens themselves could only withstand 100 shots of bullets from their body armor and if you shot to the right of where a human heart would normally be you could just easily kill them.  You could literally kill an opposing alien by just stabbing their heart.  That makes no sense.

Aliens are supposed to be fearsome and awesome creatures!  They aren’t supposed to be weak creatures that use the same kinds of weapons as humans do.  They had ONE machine that was really awesome, that was basically a gigantic flame-thrower, and their ships had lasers, but other than that their weapons seemed pretty low-tech as far as the alien race goes.

Don’t get me started on their mother-ship.  Their mother-ship was really weak.  Yes, the mother ship is the ship that controlled all the alien’s air forces and given something that has such a high priority like that, one would think that it would be better guarded right?  Guess again.

The humans were easily able to destroy their mother ship by launching ONE LASER GUIDED ROCKET at it.  Once they had a direct hit on the mother-ship, the whole thing blew up.  What kind of aliens build a mother-ship that can be destroyed so easily?  After the humans blow up the mother-ship you can see them going back to the military base and then telling everyone else how they destroyed the mother ship, so the rest of the human resistance can beat them more.  If the aliens had better technology they could have won but no, they underestimated the humans.

4 Comments on "“Battle: Los Angeles” or why Aliens Should Have Better Military Technology"

  1. The movie had to set the stage for the humans to be the eventual victors, i feel this parallels War of the Worlds a lot except you did feel a sense of true fear with those aliens, sorry to hear it was not as awesome, however i think you may have just saved me some money.

  2. Your analysis is incorrect. The aliens could see humans. The flying drones detected radio signals and tracked the marines that way. When they turned them off, the drone could not DETECT them. They could still be seen. If they could not be seen, how could you explain the end scene where the aliens were shooting at them. Aaron's character even mentioned that their done technology was far superior to our own.

  3. Angry Jenks | April 23, 2011 at 1:52 pm |

    True, the "ship" that was destroyed with "only a grenade" was a drone. Before this drone pursued them, it detached from a larger "ship" holding many other drones.

    And the drone was lured into a gas station, o it really wasn't "only a grenade".

    I also wondered if the aliens themselves could only see electronic signals.

    In many of the firefights, 10 marines would fend off "dozens" of aliens. When they did fight up close the aliens seemed to always miss, like when Lanahan shot that aien into the pool.

    The alien artillery seemed to just shoot willy in all directions in hopes of killing things. The drones had machine guns on the bottom that constantly shot things underneath as it flew. In the final scene there was some kind of alien tank that shot machine guns out of all sides. Why use this against 6 or 7 marines?

    Even their drones didn't shoot the helicopters out the sky – they flew right through them.

    I am still wondering if the aliens could in fact "see". The alien they experimented on had no pronounced eyesholws, …..

  4. Lets imagine that we invade the underwater world. How much can we see, how far can we see?

    Our eyes are designed for our world, but drop humans into night and we can't see anything and even our night vision technology limits our ability to see. The aliens to me felt more like cyborgs than actually creatures but lets say they where the race they where in pretty bad shape. That much augmentation to their body would suggest that they either where never based to live on a planet like ours or they have had to augment them selves just to survive.

    I like the movie for what it was. A race of aliens come to earth with maybe 200 year more advance technology, their command base was no better than an FOB with predator drone and command and control capability. They have no nukes or weapons of mass destruction and have spent a lot of time and effort to get to us.

    Now imagine that american invades Russia with all we got, but there is no way back, its basically a one way trip. I personally think we are way ahead of the Russian but would that really mean anything? Over time our forces would be pounded to submission even with less able weapons.

    Also the Aliens attacked a lot of different places almost like hopping that one of them would win. reminds me of the wars we are in right now. spread out all over the place with no clear way of wining any of them. For them to win they would have needed to drop a lot of nukes all over the planet but that would have also been probably bad for them. The part that they hit on the side where our heats where, to me seems more of a brain than an actual heart. The head showed no eyes so there is nothing to say that the brain was also up there. This is a race of heavily augmented individuals.

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