Let's Play The Blame Game

BATTLE: L.A. is an atrocious movie.


Just how atrocious? Like a perfect storm of atrociousness. I haven't wanted to get out of a theatre this badly since Clint Eastwood's GRAN TURINO, and I almost ended friendships with people over that movie.

Unlike Clint's grumpy-man-learns-to-love senility exercise though, this is an alien invasion movie. Not only should I have been primed to love this, but even if it was sub-par, I should have at least been entertained. I mean, I'm the guy that watched James McTiegue's THE INVASION all the way through. Remember the $7.25 that made? That was me. Instead, halfway through BATTLE: L.A., I was wondering if I had literally seen every single moment of this movie before, in one form or another, and if a Mad Libs: Army book could have written a better script.

Playing the blame game with this stinking pile of shit is like having complaints about the Oscars: at some point, the well-deserved scorn reaches critical mass, and all you can do is sit back and wonder about the point of the entire process. So instead of bemoaning some of the most horrifyingly condescending ADR I've ever heard, or lamenting the sheer pointlessness of immediately dropping an audience into combat, only to pull them out and drown them in twenty minutes of expositional character scenes, I want to examine the whole point of playing the blame game. Where does disappointment come from, and why do we feel like meting out punishment for those that fail our expectations?

To examine this, allow me to lambast Ridley Scott's BLACK HAWK DOWN, a clear stylistic influence on BATTLE: L.A.


Ridley Scott doesn't get a fair shake around this blog, and I'm damn proud of that. Unlike his brother, Ridley aims for greatness, and while that may be admirable, it makes his failures that much larger. Such is the case with BLACK HAWK DOWN, an intriguing portrait of warfare that completely misses the point of the events it dramatizes. In fact, everything after the 30-minute mark might as well be labelled "Jerry Bruckheimer and the U.S. Army's BLACK HAWK DOWN" in that every U.S. soldier is a shining example of grounded moral fortitude.

Stephen Gaghan, the writer of TRAFFIC and the criminally underrated (and underseen) SYRIANA, tells a great story about being brought in to pitch his take on the events in Somalia to Scott and Bruckheimer. Essentially, Gaghan wanted to end the film on the image of hundreds of dead Somalians wrapped in food shipment sheets, reused as body bags, that had been branded with the stamp "Gift of the U.S.A.". Needless to say, that idea didn't really float Jerry's boat, and the resulting film decides to skirt around the questionable ethics of the situation in favour of celebrating the noble fraternity of the U.S. military (which, God knows, we haven't had enough films about yet). The entire film is a compromise, wherein Ridley gets to play with all of Uncle Sam's nice helicopters, as long as he doesn't say anything too mean about what they do. In an unrelated story, Stephen Gaghan hasn't been able to get a film off the ground for the last six years.

The disappointment I have for BLACK HAWK DOWN is rooted in the fact that it never achieves what it can be, or perhaps more accurately, what I want it to be. There's potential for great drama in the situation, but the film minimizes it and focuses on something we've seen hundreds of times before. BATTLE L.A. has the exact same problem: it doesn't only imitate the visual style of BLACK HAWK DOWN, but the thematic interests as well. I know it's unfair to compare the very real horrors of Mogadishu with an alien invasion used as entertainment; but as far as the filmmakers are concerned, these are both background issues, less important in themselves than how they affect the main characters. So instead of delving into the alien invasion, we get to see Aaron Eckhart telling kids to "be my little Marine", or Michelle Rodriguez sneer her way through another Michelle Rodriguez performance. The problem is that we didn't come to see a movie about a platoon of soldiers: we came to see an alien invasion movie. We don't care about any of these people, and it doesn't help that they're all walking stereotypes that never create a real connection with the audience. They don't connect to a reality, especially not the reality we expected to see.

So if disappointment, at least in this case, springs from not reflecting a reality we expect, what does that tell us about playing the blame game? We traditionally use blame to place the responsibility for failure at the feet of a few select people: for example, Jerry Bruckheimer can be blamed for making BLACK HAWK DOWN a jingoistic ode to the American serviceman, and Ridley Scott can be blamed for bowing to the Army and Mr. Bruckheimer's interests in bringing their vision to the screen. It's comforting to think that somewhere out there, in some alternate universe, there's a version of BLACK HAWK DOWN that didn't involve these two people, and presents a more accurate and responsible picture of the events in Somalia in 1993. It's comforting because the alternative is that the entire system is at fault. BLACK HAWK DOWN was destined to be what it is, and no one could have made it any better than it is, not even Ridley's brother.


Interestingly, I also saw THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU the other day, a film which has similar questions of fate at heart, then decides, that's interesting and all, but what if Matt Damon has to use the forces of destiny to stop a wedding? I suppose I should be grateful; at least he didn't have to stop Emily Blunt from getting on a plane. THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU is merely a bad movie, though, not a train wreck that just keeps happening, like some sort of Leslie Nielsen-tinged nightmare, and it feels easy to blame writer/director George Nolfi or studio brass for attempting to shoehorn a traditional romance into a existential sci-fi. There are only three or four choices that ruin the film for me, and make it unrealistic, either logically or emotionally.

When you look at the sheer vastness of the number of horrible decisions involved in almost every aspect of BATTLE: L.A., though, what else can you do but assume that the entire system is irreparably screwed up? We're just going to have to accept that horrible, horrible films will continue to get made until the day we die. Some of us will even pay $7.25 for them.

Now who should I blame for that?