Battle: Los Angeles (2011) — "That was some real John Wayne shit, staff sergeant."

We'd were June Wednesday morning, ninety four point five Morning, Sargeant Sargon. We now know that meet here is will Land off the coast of different cities. At this point there are really more quite friends than Hafer. We are not dying. That on Los Angeles for EPG thirteen.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Culture Cast. I am your host, Chris Dash You and I am joined by my good friend. We spend a lot of time talking about films, and I have enjoyed every single minute of it. He's a professor over there at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas. Your friend of mine, doctor David D.

Pro Mutter, put the D in that name, folks. Thank you very much, Chris. Glad to join you again for another excursion at the possible end of the world. I know, God, they just they love the end of the world in cinema, and boy, they love aliens causing the end of the world. On this episode of the Culture Cast, Doctor pro Mutter and I will be talking about a film that many of you probably forgot existed.

We're gonna be talking about twenty eleven's Battle Los Angeles. The film is directed by Jonathan Leebsman, written by Chris Bertolini, stars Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Ramon Rodriguez, Bridget moynihan, Neo Yes, the singer songwriter Nao, and Michael Pana pre becoming famous or popular. Michael Pania. I think when I was watching the film with my friend Lindsay, she goes, Oh, it's that guy. What do I know him from?

And I was like, at this point a lot of stuff then not much? Uh, Doctor pro Mutter, I'm very curious two part question, why are we talking about? Why are we talking about Battle for Los Angeles? And also is it rather apropos that we're talking about Battle for Los Angeles? Within about a week week and a half of Steven Spielberg's return to alien cinema with Disclosure Day, a film also about aliens, maybe not as bloodthirsty, but aliens nonetheless.

Well, I suggested this film because I felt it was a well done example of a genre that you think can't be well done anymore because we've seen so many variations of it. And let's just take one example. Hear aliens? Right, So I'm old enough I get to say that once for podcasts. I'm old enough to have seen seventies films, eighties films.

I read science fiction that was from the thirties and forties. I watched Star Trek, I watched other science fiction television shows. I have probably physically read descriptions of and seen visions of artistic, cinematic painting, whatever, visions of what aliens could look like, creatures from other planets thousands of times if you just count them all. And so you got to come up with something a little bit different, a little something of interest to get me to say. Like, oh, that's a little.

Bit original take on an alien. And then alien invasion again, that was a pretty popular genre in the fifties and sixties. You got to come up with something to jar me and go like, Okay, you know, there's some plausibilities, there's some suspension of disbelief, but that's a pretty good invasion as invasions go. And I felt that this film checked boxes of doing some little things right. And I just wanted to give you one example of a little thing where I went like, yes, that was very clever of them to do.

That is that part of the conceit of this film, which has brought discussed quite often, is that the aliens don't have tremendous air power. I mean, we live in an era where obviously airpower is very important in warfare, whether it's drone warfare, and this are the very first ones to deal with drones. I thought that was very interesting. It's dakola prescient movie, right. Very ahead of its time in twenty eleven.

Yeah. Yeah, but they do have fine craft. And the producers sat there, which I don't think was done on a certain other major blockbuster film that you just mentioned. But I think the producers of this film, the director of this film, the screenwriter, they sat there to go like, we want to have alien that fly around and engage in the Battle of Los Angeles. We just can't have a Star Trek shovel, we can't have a UFO.

We got to have something just different about them. And I felt that they're little puffs, you know, they're little burst spurts where where they weren't just one continuous jet. They were sort of I don't even know them. Of course, it's never explained, which it shouldn't. There should there shouldn't be any scene like, oh, yes, they use this for propulsion or whatever.

But I just thought that was a little touch that they'd be go like, oh, those are different than alien space earthbound aerial spacecraft that I've ever seen before in a movie, and I think it just does a number of those. And then the last part is I'm I'm a sucker for a platoon film, for a squad film, for a film which shows war through the eyes of a small unit, a band of brothers, and the original idea of the film and that this is like, you know, I was reading about the conception of the film was that like, we would do an alien invasion, but at the squad level, like just four, five or six guys, ten or twelve men and women in the military and their battle. In the beginning of the film, we do have like news broadcast, but after that there's basically no you know, cut to the Pentagon where people are screaming over gigantic screens, where the president of Serbias is discussing with the president of the Nited States.

This is just at the ground level. I liked it, which I don't like to showcase as something of relevance or importance, but I liked those little elements and the story that it told wasn't pretentious film. We can learn a lot from it as a genre film. I saw this in theaters with a friend of mine, and he and I sat and I remember watched this movie, and I can't exactly remember off the top of my head because a lot has happened and been smoked since then, and I just don't necessarily have the capacity to remember how I walked away from twenty eleven's Bottle Los Angeles feeling. So all I can comment on and this is, you know, pre podcast obviously, this is twenty eleven.

So I started the podcast three years later, which is crazy to think about in and of itself, So having only been podcasting for three years at that point, I never returned to this movie. I actually, in a lot of ways sometimes forget that this movie existed, and I think a lot of people have as well. Which is I think to your kind of initial statements and thesis on the movie, I think it does do a very good job at something that is not really wasn't really being done at the time then with this genre in a lot of ways still really hasn't been done now with this genre. But it where it's successful, it's really successful. Where it is a failure, I think it's an obvious and abject failure and I think a lot of that comes from leaning into tropes like hard, really hard, to the point where we have like a group of characters that's bound to die, the dad who's going to sacrific a lot of the stuff that's just you've and like you said, you're you know you you use the term you're like, you're a sucker for like a good like squad movie, Like those are those tropes that they mine.

And for me that is probably not like the least successful part, but it's the part where I'm like, I'm not a huge war movie guy, because they tend to go and lean into those tropes and here when they do them, I'm just like, hey, YOYI movie. We couldn't have done anything else. But I understand that also the intention of every filmmaker is to not is not to make the newest, most exciting, most unique, creative thing ever made. Sometimes tropes are used because they are easy to use and they are not expected to be something difficult for you to lean into because everybody else has done them, and everybody else doing them is not necessarily a bad thing. It's not also necessarily a good thing for some people.

It's gonna work for other people, it's not gonna work. I can understand that I am not in the majority of film watchers sitting here and going, well, you know, this is just like this, and this is just like this, and this is just like this. Not everybody's doing that. Let's just get that out of the way. I'm doing that because I sit and watch movies all the time, one might even say for a living.

So if that's what I'm doing, then the expectation is I am watching for the tropes all the time, and I think that film reviewers lose sight of that from time to time. You know, all the tropes are in this movie. Yeah, And you know what, plenty of people enjoy the tropes, either because they don't watch enough films to have been inundated with it constantly, or because those tropes just don't don't bother them, because that's the expectation of the genre, and if it's not in the genre, some people are wondering where those things are, as opposed to saying, well, here it's, you know, third act, so the dad's got to die. You know. James Bond movies worked because they were formulaic and expectational in a way, and I think that that's a very obvious case study for well, can you make a movie that leans into the tropes and be successful.

Yes, James Bond is one of those franchises where it's like, look, it's for like thirty years it did the same thing. It started finally bristling under the tours, coming in and making the movies, and all of a sudden it was we don't want to do this anymore. And you know what, I agree, some of the things are necessary to no longer exist, but plenty of the things still work. So all of that out of the way to say, I think this movie works better at times than it fails at times. But I will say, for someone who's not a war movie guy at all, it does have a lot of those war or war movie tropes.

But again in this film's benefit, again for me personally not a fan, but for this film's benefit, I think it helps really ground it in at the time a post the nine to eleven current Iraq war timeline, post blackhawk Down film timeline, the film blackcok Down, not the event, but the film blackcock Down, because you can see a lot of blackhawk Down in this movie. You can see a lot of nine to eleven imagery in this movie. I mean again, you know, to go to Steven Spielberg. War of the Worlds was his nine eleven movie. It really was, like, you know, it is a lot of like nine to eleven imagery.

You got Tom Cruise running around the streets covered in dust. If that for a certain age of person doesn't evoke a certain kind of imagery, don't know what to tell you. For most people who grew up and were able to see those nine to eleven images, seeing Tom Cruise running around in dust, covered in dust in War of the World's is very close approximation to that. We don't have any imagery of American soldiers fighting on the front lines of our country against a foreign invader. That has never happened in our lifetime.

Fingers crossed it never will. This movie, I think, is a very interesting observation on what it would look like if the invaders were not of another country, but of another species exterior to our planet. I think that this is a very interesting kind of take on that. As a genre, I will say having a bunch of cookie cutter characters again in this context works because it's not really about the characters as much as the situation that they've been thrown into and experiencing the horror of the situation through their eyes. So every character is a rather broad beat, as it were, or a broad stroke, and looks something like Odyssey coming out here in a couple weeks, I think is once again a good indicator of something like that, where it's complexity of characters doesn't necessarily matter if the situation and the characters are drawn very broadly.

Complex characters can tend to get lost in this complex structure that some film writers want to go with. This film is aliens are invading and we're following a platoon in Los Angeles. It doesn't need to be any more than that, and the fact that it's not is not necessarily a bad thing. I think for this film it kind of works. But I understand how, and I include myself in this group.

Some people would watch this movie and go, you're not doing enough. I fall into the camp if you're not doing enough, because this is such a novel premise that nobody's really done anything with since that. It kind of blows my mind that this is the only one of these movies we have, and that it isn't It wasn't a prototype for someone to do something else with it. This is kind of where that idea stopped and started. And that's shocking for me because this idea seems really ripe for repeat or re examination in a big budget capacity, because again that's the other thing.

This is a big budget Hollywood movie. There were other movies that came out that ripped this movie off, specifically Battle of Los Angeles, which is the asylum film of the more or less identical name, but nobody's even done this since, which that kind of for me kind of makes this movie just a tad more frustrating, because it's like, this movie's a lot of wasted potential in a lot of ways for someone who wanted more than just a battle movie in Los Angeles. And if it had inspired someone else to do more with it, I think you'd look back at this movie it's like, well, this is a fun starting point, but it's like a fun starting and stop point, and that's maybe in twenty twenty six, the biggest knock against this movie is that it didn't inspire more things that kind of just exists singularly as its own thing.

There's not even a sequel to this movie, which is again shocking because the movie made a lot of money, like three times it's budget, which you know, looking at something like Mandalorian and Grogu right now barely breaking even like this movie was a success, like a real bona fide success. No, see, it was a success, and. I mean I just looked up. I really didn't know until we were going to do this show. I looked it up.

It cost about I think, I think in those dollars it costs about a third of what it eventually made, which is good, right like Halftimes, you have to be there, and it had no I mean, Aaron Heckhart was not and still is not, like he's not Tom Cruise. I mean, I actually think he's a very good actor artter of fact when he was he was born in America but raised in England and his accent. I'm always really impressed by those British actors who can who play and can play somebody and all. We have to look it up to find out that they're British. You can't tell for or that they have you know, they were raised in Britain in his case.

But it didn't have any star power in terms of the director, the screenwriter, anyone associated with it to like have a box off this straw. I think that that needs to be pointed out. I mean, I have nothing against Steven Spielberg, but obviously when a Steven Spielberg movie opens, there's a pre built in audience. And we've discussed now whether there's any stars left. I mean, Tom Cruise can still I think, although I guess one of the Mission Impossible movies was an exception can guarantee a certain amount of people showing up.

Is there anyone left in Hollywood besides importing bts from Korea to be in a movie that or doing a movie about Michael Jackson, you know, celebrities of yesteryear who are passed away that can guarantee an opening. So it is interesting how successful the movie was despite not having anything except just the story. And we go back to it if I'm going to professor mode for a moment. There are a couple of things here which I like because they brought out some of the issues that whenever I watch a war film or I watch a post apocalyptic film. I think I like them as examples to talk about because they bring out the essentialism of human nature, like like it's life or death it's not where should we go for dinner?

It's not you know, it's not even a career choice, like you know what WHI should I major in college? This is the extermination of the human race or not right? This is surviving the apocalypse or not right? And post apocalypse films, war films, especially at the squad level. I mean, you could watch what you're watching mand of Brothers or The Pacific or they just did the Masters of the Air series, and you're going like, yes, we know ahead of time.

The plot turns out America wins World War Two, but that doesn't mean this squad is going to survive, right, So we are still, unless we've read the book, wondering what's going to happen. And so that that to me is that essential ism of like not knowing. I mean, yes, probably I should be quicker on the uptake. And like a cute kid isn't is rescued with his father. It's not going to be the cute kid that dies at the no sacrificing himself for his father.

I did like that they they didn't do other things like, for example, there is no love story, right, There's no there's no like the Life and Kid thankfully that Aaron Heckhart has to prove himself to byars. Go and save Yeah. Oh yeah, my god. Can you imagine how insufferable that would have been. There's a there's a there's a great, strong, intelligent female character who's a veterinarian, right, and that proves to be interesting the part of the plot of the film that she can you do an autopsy of of of non human animal.

But and and there's a moment there why you think, like, Okay, after the movie is over, maybe they'll they'll get together or something like that. But but there's no love story there. There's no like, oh kiss me, it's the end, you know. So like, I approve of that choice. I think that was a very very smart choice to do.

And so I yeah, a lot of the tropes were familiar, but they were acceptable within the stream. I'll bring up one more thing that I think war films bring up, and it was a little heavy hand at the times. If I were editing this film, I'd like have one less scene of somebody saying what the moral of a moment is. But Aaron Eckhart plays a sergeant and traditionally in the military, probably going back to Roman times the sergeants were the career professionals who were highly experienced, and he and he plays a highly experienced career sergeant. And the lieutenants like the the lieutenant here who Lieutenant William Martinez played second Lieutenant William Martinez.

He he plays a new officer fresh out of West Point, you know, fresh out of ROTC. Right, and that is a familiar thing, you know, the grizzled sergeant who sort of has practical knowledge versus the brash new lieutenant who thinks they know everything because they came out of the military academy. I think they do that well and especially with the issue, and I know this is I guess it's a little bit familiar of like, you know, something happened in the previous war and people are mad about it, and right. That's a that's a hell of a trope. Like my brother was in that platoon, like an he didn't come back and use it.

It's like, oh yeah, yeah, that I might have. But it gets to this really good scene, which I think as somebody who spent my time in leadership, I thought a lot about leadership and I read a lot about leadership, and obviously academic leadership or corporate leadership and military leadership are not all the same. However, that moment where the sergeant is explaining to the young lieutenant, you know, you're paid to make a decision. It isn't always necessarily going to be the right decision, go right, go left. You're paid to do something and right.

It may turn out to be wrong. You may have had all the right reasons and end up doing the wrong thing. But that's an element of leadership. And I thought that was an interesting takeaway, like that was an intelligent takeaway from the plot of a movie that you know, the audience could go like, Okay, I see I see some something emerging from character there that is not just cardboard cutout. Right, And I would agree.

I think that that's one of the scenes in the movie that really resonated with me, when they were kind of taking him to task and he starts repeating their names and their tag numbers, like that's look, it's like it's from a million other war movies in some capacity or another, because that we've seen that trope before. It's been used before, but again here it works, and I think it's again, like you know, I was looking as we were sitting here I was. I was looking and thinking myself like aaronet Kart, huh, Like what happened? Man? Like not to him as an actor, but why did he not?

Like, you're in a movie that makes three times its budget, You're the lead actor in this is coming three years after and you know you tell me the most obvious thing you know him from? Because for me, while he is in one of my favorite movies, which is Thank You for Smoking, where he plays Nick Naylor, which I think is for me, my favorite thing I've seen him in, obviously he's in the Dark Night, which is the thing that I think most people know him for or from because of the Chris Nolan of it all. And then it should have been this, I mean, three years after that film came out. He's the lead in a big budget summer blockbuster. Because this is a summer blockbuster.

I saw it over the summer. It's a seventy million dollar war movie, but it's a sci fi war movie, so it's meant to have broad crap, cross genre appeal to people outside of just the I would not have gone and seen this movie in theaters if it had just been a war movie. Maybe The Battle for Los Angeles of it All, the like Alternate History of it All would have been the only way to get me into it. But a war movie broadly is not something I'm into. So when I think about Aaron Eckhart, like he's been in two genre films that are not specifically the genre they're made for, because The Dark Knight is also not it's not really a superhero movie.

I can't really stand that movie or the sequel, Like I would say The Dark Knight's better than the sequel than the sequels, just intolerable in a way that's hard to really put into words other than if you want to hear the Projection Booth episode I did with Mike White last year where we talked about it for like two and a half hours and went into every single nuance as to why I can't stand that movie. And I don't say that about a lot of things, but Aaron Eckhart, for me, is an actor who looking at his career since Battle Los Angeles. Why has he been treated like a Bruce Willis or Steven Segaal post the Night. Yeah, I wanted them, Sorry to interrupt, but like I realize when we were going to be doing this, they're like, gosh, I don't haven't seen that many air and Eckhart movies.

So I looked up his filmography and I had not heard of almost every single movie he'd done since this movie. It's wild, right, I mean, please please don't call and yell at me if you're Aaron Eckhart's agent. But I was thinking, like the week after I mean this opened pretty well. I mean it said opening weekend when I was looking this up, of forty million dollars in two thousand and eleven, which is probably I don't know, one hundred million, eighty million today. It's to be like somewhere in the ballberg, like fifty is sixty today.

I would assume, yeah, yeah. Which is you know, again, for a movie that didn't cost the equivalent of three hundred million or's four hundred million or a billion dollars or whatever. So so I I think that is an interesting question. That's where a panel of people would say, like, why is it? There's some people who are because in every movie I've ever seen him, every television show, he's an excellent actor.

He's not like a genre actor or a hero heroic actor who can only appear as a star like he's played minor parts and done or walk on parts and done very well on them. So that is an interesting mystery in this film for people who haven't seen it yet. One of my distinguishers of an actor is, as we've talked about before, is there I believe that there are facial actors. They're torso actors, and they're full body actors. Right.

There are some people who can look at the camera and they can speak, and they can act well with their voice and their eyes. That's it. There's some people who like above the chests, they can with their hands, they can do something interesting. But then there are people and I think Aaron Hackerter is one of those people who, like you see him sitting right, like, I was watching a couple of the scenes here where he's just sitting and he's putting ammunition in his rifle or he's making an offhand comment, and I was thinking, his knees are acting, right, his boots are acting. He's just his stance is a good acting stance.

And so I just I was remembering, Gosh, I'm so impressed with him. I don't think I said at the time, twenty level like a star is born because he does he doesn't have. I don't want to say he doesn't have charisma, but he doesn't have that kind of thing, like he's not a classical leading man facially or in body typing. You don't think you don't think he looks facially like a classic leader. I think it's me, it's I think.

Right, yeah, I mean if if you I don't think he's classic, he's one hundred percent classic. You know, pretty boy, handsome, you know again, the where you see them on a beach in Malibu and like cast them in a movie or something like that. I don't know. I don't have any explanation except he's a very good actor. He really is.

But but you look at his filmography and like three years of three years go by and he's not in anything, and and then maybe maybe a personal choice. I don't know his biography. Aaron, please call me, let's talk, you know, if you want to. But in this movie, he is totally credible as this sort of getting physically beat up, tired sergeant that you know he's given his life for his country. In terms of like he doesn't have again, there's no there's no backstory of guy.

I was thinking of all the Roland emmeriic films where the lead character is a divorced guy and his wife is now with a. You're just describing, like all the disaster movies, what was the Rock story versus what was Will Smith's story? And independence stuff. Yeah, just I appreciate where this film didn't go as well as where it went. And this is something again we talk about a lot about, like you got to give credit for the decisions that are made not to do something as well as right decisions to do something in a film.

It gets to the action of the aliens in thirteen minutes into the movie fit less than it's around the fifteen minute mark in a two hour movie that we get the alien. And I think that to your point, that's really smart because if the advertising is look at the aliens invading Los Angeles, I don't need a half an hour of the of the matriculations and gestations and all the nonsense that's going on between all the people here. I don't care if someone's getting promoted. I don't care if somebody's not part of the crew anymore. I don't need any of that.

I mean, frankly, if you had started the film with you know that shot that they showed in the trailer for the first Star Wars sequel, where it's like the light flashing on everybody's faces as they're coming into, you know, from Camp Pendleton or wherever on a helicopter in and you have to see like the lights flashing of the shots that are being shot at the helicopter at night, something like that. Even just having the movie open and media res I don't need. I don't know if I even need as much characterization as they give us for some of the characters, because if you want this to be a we're just following grunts. I don't know how much characterization I really need other than like quips or pithy pithy dialogue or something a minor characterization.

But to your point, like sometimes the characterization, the over characterization gets in the way because some of these characters, Like, don't give me a characterization of a character that's is gonna get blown up on a helicopter, because like I just you as a movie clearly don't care. I as the audience also shouldn't care. Some of the characters we know are just gonna be there to die to raise the stakes of the movie. I think they place the importance properly where it needs to be. I don't.

I don't know if I will ever vibe with the acting stylings of one Nao because again, like him being in the movie is more of a distraction because I know him more as a singer songwriter, not as a actor, and I don't think the world knows him as an actor. But he's in this movie. I know that much. I think every disaster film has to have one hip hop or K pop star. We're going to do battleship at some point, right.

Good nine good. I would say you could literally do the film that he that Neo was in next year. I don't know if you saw it in theaters, but I did. I went and saw Red Tales in theaters. Which just no, I did not know, but I saw that there there so one thing you're you're mentioning, which I think is interesting.

So I'll tell a little secondhand war story. So my father was in the Navy, and he was a lieutenant junior grade engineering officer on a Fletcher class destroyer World War two destroyer, and he didn't, like a lot of people from his generation, he did not tell a lot of war stories like I have like none. But he he did pass on some things that he learned and observed, and he told the story of how his first day on the ship and he and the other officers of lower rank were meeting with the captain, and there were two or three young officers, including my father, who were just their first day of the ship, and the captain said, this is a US naval ship. We must operate, unquestionably as a team. No one gets to be a freethinker or independent.

We must operate as a team. That's the only the ship. Ship is built to do that. However, never let me catch any of you forgetting that every single sailor on this ship, everybody who salutes to has a family that cares about them and wants to see them come home. That doesn't mean that we might not have to sacrifice them.

That doesn't mean that we, wait, I need to sacrifice our entire ship. Because of course, my father was in the Atlantic escorting convoys and hunting U boats. But like you know, destroyers were supposed to take the first hits. They were supposed to protect capital ships, especially if he'd been transferred to the Pacific, which I think I told this story. But the point was that I do like stories where we get enough characterization to care right, right.

And I know I've never made a war film myself, but like I know, there must be a balance, because you can't have two hours of exposition to learn the life story of everybody, right, and then there's a battle for five minutes at the end. People aren't going to watch that film. And you don't need it. You don't need it. But I felt that we had enough to Okay, there's these conflicts, these drama boom, the war begins, they have to work together or it's all over.

And I'm I'm with you. I think if the film or TV show or what have you is willing to go along with the idea that, like you said, like sometimes I don't need any more than just they are human beings. That's it. Like, I don't know if I need more than that. Frankly, if the movie had leaned more into the realism of it all, I mean, that's the other thing.

And I wanted to kind of ask you about this because you know, you have a rather well known book about you know, war and how film and media portrays war and perceives war. I almost feel like the film would have benefited more from being a little bit I would say more realistic, but again like not requiring it be r rated. But I think you kind of maybe get what I'm getting at where it's like I maybe wanted the film to lean into the black hawk down of it a little bit. And again, maybe that's the wrong sentiment here, maybe I'm coming from the wrong place, But for me, I feel like it's just if we're gonna go with as little characterization as possible, and we're gonna have again just like aliens, literal aliens, not like not a representation of aliens, but a literal alien running around or aliens running around.

Maybe have the dichotomy between the two be even starker and have it be like this super realistic, hard hitting, like really black hawk down people being not a viscerated, but again like the state are really ratcheted up. It does feel in a way like the stakes in this movie don't match kind of what they want from it, which is this to be like a somewhat serious adjacent war film, or at least like taking it seriously, because against it taking it seriously, Like we said, there's not a whole lot of fun in this movie. There's a part where they're effectively torturing an alien with knives and like poking it while they're doing like an autopsy on it, which is this movie's black Hawk down like leg surgery moment.

I get it, but I just I kind of weird if I want it more. That was an interesting decision. They decided not to have a character say we'll wait a minute, you know, we're not obeying a Geneva convention in terms of prisoner or wait a minute, you know, these are these people have feelings too that there's no That was an interesting decision that they They didn't do that trope right of having the moralistic argument these aliens are here, they're here to apparently exterminate us no rules. Right, which I think is very smart. Right, Like, I think that gives you an idea of what the tension or the expectations should be.

But I do think, like again, I just wish there had been a little bit more of a sense of not again like realism, but a sense of realistic stakes. And I think the movie just doesn't necessarily get there. And I will also say probably, and this is maybe the biggest knock against this movie, did we need this to be like you've already mentioned Independence Day at the end, where all of a sudden they know how to fix the entire invasion. Like that, for me is what probably draws me out of this the most. And it's again leans back into like in black Hawk Down, these are just like this.

The point of this story was the black hawk Down event was only these soldiers in this It's like this didn't have to be a bunch of these dudes effectively white saviors at some point, you know, because again we do have aaronet Cacart being one of the people that survive somehow being able to stop the entire invasion is what the implication is. And I don't know if it's meant to be just a platoon of dudes taking on alien threats that are incoming. The implication should have been, and I think Cloverfield does it better than this movie does, which is making it feel like you are but a blip on the map of a greater conflict. This takes away from that in a way by having it be well, they know how to you know, the information you figured out has been transmitted across the globe and we're gonna figure out how to take them on, Like don't do yeah, like the movie's about to end, don't do that.

There are parts and that's one of them that if I were doing edit, I would say is that necessary? Right? And it's interesting to me because you've said this independent of me being on your show, But like you've talked about the second act problem and the third act problem, Like it seems to be there's a much higher likelihood you're watching a movie and you're going, like I thought was a great first act, Like you know, that was a great start to the movie, like, oh wow, what's an interesting plot, and then nothing happens in the second act, and then there's a big action resolution in the third act. And I think I've described unfortunately, a lot of big so called blockbuster you know superhero or you know sci fi blockbuster films where they just like rattle around for the middle third of the film and then there's a big climax that they spent half the budget on there.

This is a first of all, this is the US Army. It took a long time for them to do this, like, you know, hundreds of years, but like the US Army was one of the first institutions in America to integrate It's it's an interesting history there that the US Army mostly integrated long before America did. And this this is a diverse, you know, multicultural, multi racial, multi ethnic group. I think that's important. Alms just a little bit almost like adjacent to the movie Glory about like people coming together for an external threat, you know, that to all of humanity, not just in any individual group, with all the divisions that we have.

I do think that they try to have some things like like let's go back to the alien autopsy, you know, uh they discover and again I do not I've read a lot of science fiction and I'm getting old, maybe I've forgetten something, but that thing where the alien weapons are fused to their body, and I was going to myself like, I don't think I've seen that before or read that before. And I've really read a heck of a lot of science fiction. It's a little bit silly as in like really like what if they need to upgrade, you know, like, hey, hey, bad, I think got some good news and some bad news. We invented a new laser rifle. We're gonna have to chop your arms off so that we can you know, install, but you know, it was an attempt to do something interesting.

And I love Eric, the character probably by Erhart, to talk about commitment to cause. That was very interesting, you know about like the these are marines and they and they're from a particular unit, and they tell this little backstory about you know, retreat hell, we just got here that from World War One. It's the true story. But then they confront these alien soldiers who are like. All the.

I want to say positive but like all the like useful for the job traits of a soldier, but none of the humanity, none, none of the the nuance of like having a human beings because you want you don't want automatons. I mean, I really don't want AI controlling missile hits and things like that. I want some accountable human and some somebody to make a decision. So I thought it try again. Neither of us are claiming this is like the perfect movie.

I just felt some of the decisions of what not to do and some of the decisions to do worked. For the general It's a squad level alien invasion movie. I think. And you know, you mentioned the design of the alien, so I would say that maybe the closest thing that we get or have at the time is a more kind of senobite ish like humans fused with mechanical from like Hell Raiser or even I mean again to go to like hr Giger and the Zenomar from Alien. You know, the Xenomar from Alien was somewhat biomechanical, and here it's like biomechanical, but in a way that's like you said, like military adjacent.

So they have like guns and other things fused into their body, and I really I like the creativity behind it. It's very quake for the In that game, there's the strog and they're kind of these human mechanical amalgamations, and it's similar to this. I mean, you have a chain gun on your right arm where your arm used to be like that, Like you said, the resolve of someone to go to that length to become a mutant monster like that is just to understand what their civilization is. I mean, we don't need any characterization of the Alien. We literally don't need to know them as anything other than the invading force who is here to take the resources.

That's it. We don't need to see them as anything else. And I think it's smart that the film doesn't offer us any nuance in that regard, because in a situation like this, where like you said, there's no Geneva convention with these aliens, the expectation is they're an invading force and we are fighting for our lives the end. That's it. There's the expectation is kill or be killed.

That seems to be the expectation. There are no rules of engagement. No one is saying, you know, you go quiet, now go hot. There's none of that, sorry none. I was thinking of the bad tropes they could have done.

Like I was when I first watched this movie. I had some expectations of mistakes. It would things I would disagree with, and one of them was they did not have I really expected this to happen. I was shocked it didn't happen. I was happy it didn't happen.

They didn't kill an alien and find a picture of a wife alien and a baby alien on it, like three D hologram from Star Wars or something like that. They go like, oh man, these aliens are just like us. They've got you know, wife and kids at home, and they think they're fighting. I mean, that has been indescribably squeamish and then that's not the right word, like indescribably like oh my god, really, Hollywood, please don't do that. And they didn't, you know, god right.

And I'm glad they didn't because again, like we we don't even really get that from the human beings either, which is also good, like we don't. It's not needed what we And again like I want to ask you about this because again to think about the post nine to eleven of this, all right, and that the post that landscape in American cinematic history, in American media, in American culture. This film is in a lot of ways, like a response to the Iraq War and the images people were seeing on the TV every day. And while we never saw that in the comunity of Los Angeles, there were people that were seeing that in their literal backyards on their television in Iraq. Anyone who could see something like that would have seen those images of American soldiers in their country.

We were seeing it in another country, American soldier. So it's interesting to have that kind of put here into our country. I just don't know if they do anything with that or have anything to say, and I'm not sure that the intention is to make something with something to say. But I'm just curious, like if you're going to do this movie and no one else has really done this movie since with the at least just like straight up. I mean, I guess maybe the closest is that Edge of Tomorrow film with Tom Cruise.

But again, like there's a different hook there, Like the hook of that movie. Is time to story Paris there not, you know, right. So like I guess, like it's I just don't know so. Many films, right when in so many films, let's just say the role in emeric films right where? And you've talked about this again independently of me, but I think you and I have talked about this before too, like the role in Emeric World destruction montage where you go to you see Paris, and of course everybody in Paris wears a striped mime shirt and has a beret and has a baguette under their arm, and then you go to Hong Kong.

It's like a scene from a nineteen thirties film in Color of Hong Kong where everybody had you know, everybody's eating noodles out of a bowl and with their chopsticks, and you know they look like extras from a nineteen thirties movie. Every Beddy Griffin have a dog in any of this? Oh no, that was Armageddon. Never mind, that was Armageddon. I forgot.

Yeah, no, I mean and then and then you know, Paris is destroyed, in Hong Kong is destroyed, and this movie a city is destroyed. But I think speaking to what you were talking about, really, since World War Two, the American public had not seen I mean, this did happen in Korea, like there were city fights in Korea, but really, since World War Two, most of American conflicts, with the exception of a couple of things like in the tet Offensive the Battle of Hue and that was made into the Stanley Kubrick film, you know, Full Metal Jacket, and everybody actually said, wowow, it was such an innovative film because it was about urban combat. Right, So we went many many decades in America and didn't participate in or see modern urban combat.

I mean, we would see other countries do it, but like until Iraq, that just wasn't the theater. Of war of the United States. And so I think, yeah, it did bring up this thing to watch Los Angeles, not just like Independence Day where just a bomb explodes and you see this huge you know, screen shot of the vista right of Los Angeles blanking out under a massive or buildings tumbling over or something like that. But like you see and by the way, this was shot in Louisiana at to save money. They got a fifteen million dollar tax credit.

So my I was at LSU for ten years. I did not recognize Baton Rouge in this movie. I did not know. When I went to see the movie, I did not know. I feel the same way when I watched RoboCop.

I'm like, this was supposed to be Dallas in the eighties. How did you get away with that? Or total recall in was Mexico City. It's like the same thing, Like why don't see any of this like at all? It is funny how on.

TV shows, you know, the films in Canada, ones were like, oh my gosh, the alien planet is Vancouver. I have to say, The X Files is all of that, like more or less exclusively. God bless Stargate, but like so many alien planets had a beautiful you know, redwood and plane tree forests and that thing. But so yeah, I don't remember being exactly shocked by this film, but like again, it tried to do something from the Giganto shot of like la Is destroyed with a huge alien bomb to like you're fighting over post Office is in Santa Monica. Which I loved that, right, like that's I like that, and that's and that, you know, I really want to talk about the ending of the movie.

I was probably most irritated by the ending of the movie than anything else because it look, the movie never got a sequel, and it stinks that it didn't get a sequel because this movie was successful enough financially to deserve a sequel. And there are so many movies that come out that are more successful than this movie that equally don't get sequels. But there are films that are less successful than this movie that has gotten sequels or a lot more time and effort spent on it. And if you're gonna have this ending where it's like, well, they're gonna go back out into the fight, like man, that's I hate when movies call their shot like that and then it goes nowhere, because as an audience, I'm like, man, was there another idea here that you were gonna get to?

Was there something? Was this the primer for something more interesting and kind of novel in the next film, because we've seen that before, We've seen where it's like the first film is just kind of a warm up for the second film because you got to get some people through the door in that first film, and then the second film you can really rock them with the second punch this movie. Who knows what the second film would have been. It's a shame, but man, I really detested the ending of this movie for the singular reason of, well, these guys have somehow managed to figure out the alien threat completely, and now they're gonna go back in and help everybody push them out. Like I don't know if this story would be more interesting if the humans were able to push the aliens back at all.

I don't even know if I care about what would happen post to that, because it seems like the human beings are so outmatched in this movie that I couldn't believe they're able to push the aliens back other than with you know, human ingenuity, you know, you know, there's so much of that in Independence Day. It's almost like I don't even want that in twenty eleven. I would prefer to see a film where we have the aliens win ostensibly quote unquote or take over humanity quote unquote. Again, we're watching a movie about a squad of guys fighting a global threat and force. I just I have no ability to believe they're going to be able to stop the threat completely because of Independence Day, being the president of the United States and the kind of bomb bast given to that kind of almost Shakespearean in the way that it presents the events.

I can believe that because, like you said, in Independence State, it's just there aren't a whole lot of people left from the cities that are being blown up because everybody's being torched. So I can believe the threat there. And you know, we have the nuke not blowing up the aliens in that film. The threat even in that film, the threat is parody at the level with the importance of the characters in this. It's like these characters should have no importance given to what they're doing because what they're doing is effectively nothing in terms of the actual invading force.

I don't know, and you correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe their story will be sung in the annals of human history. As you know, the three hundred of Thermopylis something like that. But if you're gonna do that at this story, they don't even get to that point with the story unfortunately. I oh, yeah, you really have to have a sound effect for when I go into professor mode, you.

Know, and nails nails on the chalkboard, like like Quint from Jaws, stopping everyone in their the audience. Yeah, nails on the chalkbod. I remember what reading science fiction stories that played with an important question which will come up if we're ever invaded by aliens, which is that the assumption is that their levels of technology would be equivalent across everything. Right, So the the the assumption of a lot of the alien invasions, I'm thinking the day the Earth did still, right, So these aliens they crossed the cosmos billions and billions of what light years or whatever, and they and they have some sort of magnificent robot technology. They also have a magnificent like you know, technology that could destroy the whole world if they want.

So everything is sort of equivalent. But there've been some science fiction stories over the years, and I'm blanking on some of the exact detail, but like I remember one of them, Like, you know, aliens invade, but all they have is gunpowder as weapons. Like they they invented. They were really good at inventing like anti grav drive and like time dilation, but they just didn't have wars, so they didn't really advance their their military. Now we have sort of kept like civilian and military technology have sort of kept up with each other right in our in our universe.

So I did like it. The aliens didn't just show up with like one technology that wiped out humans. That they they may have variable technologies. Now you're talking about the ending. To me, they were three endings, and two of them could have been kept.

The third they should have gotten rid of. The three endings were they defeat this alien mother communication ship, like they knock it out, and that their command and control ship for the area for like Santa Monica. There is preface. I was fine with that part of it. Yeah, so that that that could have been an ending, like we won the Battle of Santa Monica and this platoon was determinative of winning the Battle of Santa Monk, and that would have been roll credit, you know, like hey, high five and like thank you everybody, and okay, that there could have been a sequel to that okay.

So that was one ending. The other ending was they decided to go back into the battle because the Battle of Santa Monica is one, but there's other battles in like, you know, Santa Ana and a thousand. I'm sorry, I'm losing my Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and you know, the Battle of Beverly Hills and saw. Okay, so that would have been that's okay, But the one where and we've notified everybody in the world that they and now everybody knows how to destroy that was way to roll in em recry and that could have been cut if in my edit, my non directors edit, I would have eliminated one or two of the endings, and that would have given them room for a sequel. By the way, so if they do do a sequel based on that, I'm expecting some both of us should get some you know, subsidiary rights or something like that.

Chris, I can't hear you. I guess I don't understand if you're not gonna make something like a sequel or something sequel adjacent, why you would even tease something like that. And again, maybe the expectation was that they were gonna make a sequel, I don't know. Again, it seems like they were even working on a sequel as soon as twenty twelve, the year after this film came out, but nothing ever coalesced, And so I think, yeah, it's if I were making just the minorst fan edit of this movie, I would just probably have it cut to credits, with them returning back to the base and then going back out, but no mention of like, oh, they can transmit this to everybody like again, like I guess, I guess, can you have one without the other?

Can you have them blowing up that spaceship without them then being like, we're gonna share this information with everybody else? I guess. I guess that's what I wonder, because I. Didn't understand what the clever like inside was. I'm imagining, you know, the Serbian army fighting in Sari in Belgrade, right, and I think they would have already figured out, oh, you know, there's one ship or one alien construction that's bigger than the others.

That might be the command and control. I didn't think necessarily we needed to tell anybody that. So it wasn't like. It was because it was interrupting the radio signal. Remember, they're flying over and it's.

Like, like, you know, we know about radio signals, like we interrupted, you know, we tried to jam German radio signals and World War Two. It wasn't like it was some secret radio nobody knew about radio, you know, or something. They should have gone there. It just did to Jeff Bullbloom in Independence Day. Yeah, no, that would have been the show.

Rodriguez. Uh. I like her character very much because she is a technician and she this is confidence porn, okay, like in some ways, like these people are good at their job. And I like that they had this communications technician who didn't pretend that she was, you know, a super ninja warrior. She was really good at communications technology and helped in communications technology, and it helped engineer the problem, as they say in engineering and the military.

So like again, we'll send our notes to the studio. I hope they take them. But the film made more good decisions than bad decisions, I would say. And I would agree, I, you know, going back and reading the kind of critical response to the film at the time, a lot of the kind of flak that the film gets is from the tropes and the trope heaviness of it. But you know, sitting here as an observer in twenty twenty six, fifteen years, which is just insane and of its own right that this film has been out.

We've seen a lot of war films since we've seen Edge of Tomorrow, We've seen The Tomorrow War. Hell, you know, we didn't even talk about this. We've seen a really terrible Independence Day sequel, like just mind numbingly terrible, and again another movie that by the end of it calls its own shot of like, well, we're gonna go to the alien planet now, no, no finance our third movie. When this movie made no money, they made an independenced Ay sequel in twenty sixteen, a decade I believe removed from the original film coming out. And yet they couldn't make a sequel to this film in the five years in between Independence Day coming out and this film coming out.

For real, I believe I may be wrong that Cowboys and Aliens. I think Cowboys and Aliens came out around the same time as this movie, if not the same year as this movie. Hell it was the same year as this movie. What was the deal with twenty eleven alien movies? Either?

You know? And that's the crazy thing. The budget for Cowboys and Aliens is one hundred and sixty three millillion dollars. That movie has so many people in it, and it is directed by Jon Favreau. It might be like the one of two not great things that Jon Favreau has done that end Zathura.

Uh. But this movie had a third half of the budget and made three times as much money, And it made twice as much money as Cowboys and Aliens did. I just don't understand what happened to this movie as like a thing, like you could have just taken this idea and just run with it and recast the entire movie. You don't even have to have You could do this right now. There's nothing stopping you.

You don't need Aaron Eckhart. I mean, I don't know if he's really doing anything, so he might be easy to go and hire. I don't know. I genuinely don't know what Aaron Eckhart's doing. He thing's making a movie with a dog muzzle two streets of fury or rage or so.

I'm not even joking. There's a movie called Muzzle starring Aaron Kurt That's what we watched next. I'm no, I'm joking. I don't know, it's just very weird. Like for me, I just I don't feel like this movie is as bad as the critics in twenty eleven.

Else it would be, And I think if they revisited this movie now, they might actually have a more nuanced take other than that the war tropes are overwhelming, Like yeah, but you know, there's not a whole lot of movies like this one, and it's kind of a shame that there isn't because this movie, ultimately, even if it doesn't succeed all the way, it does have more to say than your average war, big blockbuster war movie does. I'd say that if I were like grading the film, I would probably yeah, it had one too many, but it should get credit for the tropes that it didn't use, which films which get better, much better ratings and have much more, bigger budget and you know, bigger, bigger star box office stars and things like that shamelessly youth and nobody says anything and even get credit for them.

Where it's painful to watch, right, this is not a painful to watch movie. I think it's the special effects have stood up. You can look at this film and go like, yeah, that was two thousand and eleven. It's better than these alien combats, are better than a lot of three hundred million dollars movies I'm or TV shows that I'm forced to watch now. Well, And I would say the other thing that definitely works in the film's favor is it is not over edited either, which is the other thing that now you know, you can't you can't help but watch a movie and there's like thirty cuts in one scene and it's you know, whiplash where you're watching it trying to figure out what's going on as much as what you're seeing because the director is you know, hopped up on Riddlin or something.

It's like, it's just this movie exists in a time and a place where they weren't doing that as commonplace, you know, like this is the way things are. We're still right before that. I mean, this is just before that becomes kind of like the thing that everybody does, at least in big budget action movies, and this movie doesn't have any of that. Like, I think this is a big budget action war movie of a different era and time, and I do it because to your point, like it still holds up as a big budget sci fi blockbuster movie. And the special effects look good, the practical effects look good.

It's a well made, well shot, well edited movie. Does it lean into some tropes that I wish it didn't? Sure? But you know what, there's not a whole lot of other Aaron Eckhart fighting aliens on the Street of La movies to go and watch. So I guess if I want to watch when it's gonna be this one.

And I don't know. For some reason, this movie does kind of exist in this weird liminal space in my mind of like, this is a movie I saw in theaters at a very weird time in my life that I just remember and now I've watched it again, and yeah, it's there's better, there's worse. But I think this occupies the upper average area. I would give this like a B minus. And you know what, the ability to mesh the two genres together is probably where you're getting most of the grade from.

But I'm not gonna tell you that. So Hey, sometimes it's the effort, right, Sometimes the effort is impressive alone, and the effort here I think is impressive. Do they land the finish? No? But rarely does every movie need to be a ten for God's sakes, Come on, you can enjoy at eight or A seven.

You know it's not going to change your life, but not every movie has. If you want to see Doctor or here, Doctor Pearlmutter and I talk about cinema that is, you know, different than this one. I won't say better or worse. Head on over to weirdingwaymedia dot com, where subjectivity is less important than objectivity. Now, I'm just kidding that's not the case.

Well, it depends on what we're talking. And when doctor Pearlmutter and I are talking, we're often talking about cinema that is worth watching or possibly even required viewing, which when he and I start talking in the future about loftier films, possibly that those films may be under a subheading on the RSS feed for all of you looking to find those films specifically, because hey, I'm not saying Mickey seventeen or Battle Los Angeles aren't conquering the human experience in some way, but I get the distinct feeling a lot of the other films we're going to talk about may speak to head of your tones than blowing up aliens in the in the streets of Los Angeles. So keep an eye out for that, but for everything else, like rate and review this wherever you're getting it.

If it's on iTunes, give us a follow and a rating. If it's on YouTube, subscribe or follow everywhere else. And if it's on Spotify, leave a star rating. Those all things help us out, so do them on the respective platforms. Doctor Pearl Mutter, thank you so much for joining me as always and bringing this film back into my personal consciousness.

I always appreciate the candor and the conversation and the picks you know, even if it's bad, which none of these have been bad, So. Thank you, Chris, and I appreciate your commitment to call and. As always below we'll catch you on the next episode. Steps from the Books, from the Books, From the Books, From from the Books, from bos