“Battle: Los Angeles” it is pretty much a mix of “Black Hawk Down” and “Independence Day”. Sadly, the movie has no substance and what we get is one mediocre sci-fi/action flick. This movie must have cost a lot and it wasn’t worth it.

The movie wastes no time in throwing a group of American Marines in the middle of a massive fight against unknown alien invaders. They search the streets for civilians as the air force intends to level the coastal areas in a matter of hours and every few minutes, aliens jump out and the shooting commences… it gets old very quickly.

Aaron Eckhart (“The Dark Knight”) plays Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz and he’s good but the rest of the characters are really dull. It’s easy to forget how films such as “Black Hawk Down” made you care about the soldiers but “Battle: Los Angeles” completely fails in that area. The aliens themselves are some of the worst aliens I’ve ever seen; clearly no effort went into their design as they are incredibly generic. I miss the Xenomorphs from the “Alien” franchise and Predator because those aliens were creatively designed… heck, even Ro-Man from “Robot Monster” looks better than the aliens in this movie.

“Battle: Los Angeles” is not a terrible movie but it had the potential to be a slick and engaging sci-fi/action movie but it opts for giving us generic targets for lifeless characters to shoot at. If you want to see a big movie where aliens attack the Earth blow lots of stuff up, you have “Independence Day” and if you want to see a movie about a group of soldiers struggling to survive, you have “Black Hawk Down”. This is a movie where endless generic foes are blasted away by characters you couldn’t possibly care about.