Battle: Los Angeles

Everybody in Battle: Los Angeles talks with the garbled syntax of a military recruitment ad. These aren't characters in a traditional sense, rather meat shapes with scriptbot issues designed to simulate recognisable human traits. Thankfully, these artificial characteristics are rapidly ditched as the platoon is fed into the reportage grinder, where everything becomes totally incomprehensible anyway. A 12A rating helps ensure injuries stay unbloodied and heroic while in-field foul language is kept to an absolute minimum. Not that these grunts grumble mind you, everybody here is ruthlessly on-message.

In that sense, Battle: Los Angeles is a truer adaptation of Robert A Heinlein's Starship Troopers than Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film. Rather than a withering satire of intergalactic fascism, Heinlein's novel is a love letter to the idea of the military and a man's place within it. Everybody to act as a limb of massive unthinking collective, rather than an individual. Traces here in the anti-drama of Aaron Eckhart declaring absolute loyalty, in the face of extinction, to an inept commanding officer that has just proven himself capable of wandering into an ambush. Battle: Los Angeles isn't all awful though. The alien invaders are merciless and unknowable, operating with a kind of found tech that looks like it's been cobbled together out of asteroid field wreckage. The film's highlight comes in an on-the-fly autopsy scene that sees Eckhart relentlessly digging through the kaleidoscopic insides of a squealing, bleeding POW. Desperate to find some recognisable weakness, and after much frenzied stabbing, Eckhart eventually arrives at the conclusion that shooting them in the chest might work.