Battle Los Angeles: The Peak of Gaming

in the original war of the worlds by h.g wells the alien invasion of earth was not an entirely one-sided affair instead it was a story about an actual war between earth and mars for all the aliens technological advancement they fought on a relatively similar playing field with the humans defensive lines were formed to protect london alien tripods were able to be taken out with artillery fire even the british navy engaged with the aliens on the high seas and the alien super weapon well it was just a chemical weapon black smoke these were not simply just aliens these were enemies that fought in a familiar sense to britain's enemies at the time trenches in the ground naval battles at sea chemical weapons if need be it was at the time foreign yet familiar and in just the same way that war of the worlds was a product of 19th century victorian culture battle los angeles is a product of the culture of the united states in the 2010s this is so stupid in his original review of the movie a young chris stuckman described battle los angeles as a movie that only a 13 year old would like because it felt like one of his favorite fps shooters and you know what chris i was one of those kids and i have a youtube channel now so i can say things this movie for some reason stuck with my dumb high schooler brain i even have the same original movie ticket 10 years later mostly because i forgot to clean out my wallet but that's not the point here as a young cody i had some reasons for just liking battle la i don't know it just clicked i thought it wasn't like the other alien invasion movies it wasn't like that stupid independence day being all unrealistic yeah it was gritty it was grounded and by grounded young cody didn't mean you know soldiers in combat fighting in a realistic manner no young cody meant it had a shaky cam that was it wow it feels so real while i had fond memories of this movie as a kid i haven't watched it in years you know life is busy interests shift and evolve over time and while i don't really re-watch many movies anyway throughout that time i never really thought you know i'm going to re-watch battle la but now i have a great excuse to so let's do it battle los angeles begins smack dab in the middle of a battle los angeles explosions all around we regret being alien bastards anti-aircraft fire from all sides asteroid ships raining from the sky things look like they're getting pretty bleak when suddenly cut to earlier oh oh no [Music] remember that trend whenever a movie needed to establish that it was indeed in california it would have a single establishing shot playing with california love [Music] is crucial for a song made in the mid 90s it sure did have a resurgence in the early 2010s my god [Music] we follow sergeant nance played by aaron eckhart who you may remember as the joker in the dark knight but i remember him as his best role president in the critically acclaimed film olympus has fallen nance is getting out his time in the marines is coming to an end two weeks from retirement you may say he made some bad calls back in iraq and it led to a few of his men getting killed a reputation that has stuck with him we follow and see the lives of a few marines outside and around the base their personal lives and what they're dealing with be it planning a wedding hanging out with the guys mourning the loss of a brother or dealing with ptsd there's even a new rookie who's teased for being a virgin wait a minute i remember that face max first victim of the year there buddy okay so now my in mind canon is that the bully from max keeble just turned his life around and joined the military sure he keeps laughing along with the virgin jokes he can never tell his friends the real story if you've been touched that way don't be ashamed tell someone you trust meanwhile while all of this is happening in the background there's new snippets and flashes on the tv that show something isn't right meteors getting bigger in the span of hours crashing off the coast of other world cities everything is just normal for the troops until the humvees arrive to interrupt training it's a general evacuation of the city nobody knows what these things are but some are starting to suspect and those suspicions are confirmed there they are everyone's still on the beach beach is closed people come on for some reason despite this being recorded on news cameras the footage looks like it was shot in the 90s you see this a lot when movies want something to be mysterious and spooky the more spooky it is the more film grain they'll be it's just a rule i can't change it anyway aliens have arrived that morning sure did take a turn but everyone takes it in stride they have a job to do outside of joking about e.t not much can really else be done give me like from space no emily from canada oh you always get jokes don't all right line it up bring it in let's go on just the ride over to the fob they're already taking air fire so things are going great which brings us back to the opening that was 20 minutes ago i guess they really just wanted to put that action part at the beginning can't start off the movie following around marines in their personal lives huh did they think the general audience would just get bored while waiting five minutes look i get setting the tone for the movie in the very beginning but there had to have been a better way of doing this without repeating the same scene in the span of 20 minutes the plans are made the marines mission is to help evacuate the population near the beach before the military brings in their air superiority to wipe santa monica off the map as far as the military knows these aliens don't have airships so it should be a cakewalk aren't they in for a surprise once deployed into the city things are pretty desolate and abandoned it's quiet until it's not alright so i'm not gonna go through every little plot point i think you get the idea by now aliens invade humans try to stop them you've seen this before the plot going forward is essentially just a series of missions and fire fights as the marines try to make their way out of santa monica before the bombs explode that's the story at least in the first half what i'm more interested in is well the uniqueness of the fighting not simply the action itself but the creative decisions that had to be made to make this fight uh fair as the land sharks that's what they're called are not really like any other alien force we've seen in film because these aliens are weak as hell when questioned about the movie battle los angeles director jonathan liebsman said i think that what we were trying to do was make a war movie that had aliens rather than do an alien movie that just had soldiers as an afterthought and yeah that's pretty much what it is this is not an alien movie this is a war movie using aliens there's a difficulty bringing aliens into any conflict with humanity as it all comes down to technological level a balance has to be struck between having the aliens be an overwhelming destructive force while not being too unfair in a firefight sure you could have the aliens just invade using primarily vehicles and simply bombard from the air but that doesn't leave anyone with a fighting chance and the marines just become any other soldiers in an alien movie so the solution is to make the alien invaders be nerfed hard despite having technology to travel through space and invade another planet these are some of the least technologically advanced aliens i've ever seen [ __ ] out here boy get that weak [ __ ] out of here they make a memorable entrance for sure but once they get into the city their general tactics are much more human the aliens use squad infantry they fire projectile weapons basically bullets and their weaponry is only a grade above our own sure it's attached to their body and it can look weird but this is firepower that can be deflected by kevlar or military armor sometimes it can't even pierce the armor of a humvee in fact the most advanced weapon the landsharks bring to the battlefield is what i can only describe as that boston dynamics robot with four rpgs strapped to the top they don't even use the robot bot against a tank they use it against infantry if you've ever played an rts you just know that's a waste of rockets right there but when they don't have the advantage the aliens hide on the rooftops or freeways almost like they were planning on ambushing the marines now you might be thinking this is a criticism but it really isn't not every alien race has to be incredibly advanced or follow the same pop culture depiction of what advanced technology would look like the point of battle la was to be a war movie first therefore the way the aliens fight and are designed is first and foremost to be fair while making halo bungie had a philosophy when designing the covenant while the aliens were technologically advanced they couldn't be too advanced their weaponry was energy based sure but they would never carry lasers the covenant could only shoot slow-moving plasma this reason was to give the player time to dodge and take cover this led to a gameplay experience that was player focused and despite the covenant's technological advantage over the player the gameplay at the end of the day felt fair for the sake of entertainment logic and reason sacrificed in part for the sake of giving the protagonist a fighting chance this is a good thing because you remember what happened when the covenant actually got that laser weapon yeah so what was that whole tirade about since battle la is a war movie involving modern day us marines just like the covenant in halo the land sharks were designed to be fair because to be honest this movie wouldn't work if there was an incredibly advanced alien empire coming to wipe humanity out this movie wouldn't work if the aliens even had shields because then our guns would be useless these aliens had to be infantry based the occasional vehicles they may use are always designed with no cover the same logic as a ghost or a warthog their entire design was crafted around being reasonable opponents that could be still taken down in an urban setting by afghanistan era marines back out which is why they don't simply invade from the air but come from the sea it's practically a human naval invasion they don't bomb out entire sections of the city but instead secure areas like insurgents would towing the line between alien invaders and pseudo militant fighters to give the marines we follow a fighting chance this is about the men on the ground the tactics training and environment of being a marine brought into the worst case scenario it may not have the best writing when you invade a place for its resources you wipe out the indigenous population or the best plot but there is one thing battle la brings to the table the energy going through past reviews and comments this movie seems to strike a particular core with former veterans and active military and i think that comes from simply the effort given to remain as involved in the military perspective as possible like this is still an alien invasion an overwhelming situation and the marines apply their training and tactics to each problem they face that energy is the best thing this movie has going for it it's a war alien movie and it isn't the best war movie and it isn't the best alien invasion movie but it hits with a very particular crowd and i was part of that crowd hi i'm knowing better i make videos about history government and psychology and i'm also a veteran who deployed to iraq in 2009 this movie came out shortly after my return home i grew up loving alien invasion movies stargate alien predator independence day starship troopers you name it i watched it but this was the first one i could think of where the main characters were guys like me they weren't the president or some special unit in the future they were dressed the same way i was they used the same weapons i did and they spoke basically the same language marine english is a little different from regular english and they're fighting an evenly matched humanoid enemy they don't have giant city destroying lasers or disgusting face huggers they're just like us they even use hand signs to communicate and can be seen dragging away their wounded the same way we would but most important of all they were unambiguously evil after coming home from a morally confusing deployment i got to see people dressed like me fighting against an unquestionable existential threat they invaded us without warning in order to steal our resources it doesn't get much more black and white than that and when i think about it that's basically what all alien war movies are designed to do make the military look good by providing an obvious bad guy to fight battle los angeles would come off very differently if it was set in the middle of iraq or afghanistan suddenly running over the enemy with an lav would be a lot less fun to watch but in other movies the aliens are supposed to represent an actual group of humans making the morality and message a lot less clear would you like to know more [Music] upon this last re-watch for the video i would not call this a particularly fantastic movie like i said it's not the best of either but i can still see how some would enjoy it either it's through relating with a feeling or understanding a situation because you've been there there's another aspect of this i haven't really talked about the other energy one that really only existed in what i call the modern warfare era in the span of these five years if anything was militaristic it had this fun if anything wanted to be cool it had muted colors or an overlay of beige when every movie thought using shaky cam was a great idea oh [ __ ] i'm gonna throw up when decent color grading literally did not exist and there were just a ton of modern military things out all coincidentally ending after modern warfare 3 and this movie i know i sound crazy but this was a real thing and everyone did it and nobody talks about it if you wanted to make a movie seem gritty or militaristic just slap what what's it called euro style next no that's dumb just slap the modern warfare font on your movie and it wouldn't look generic at all this is the comic sans of action movies battle la is one of those movies that if it works for you then it does i think viewing it through sapiotone glasses doesn't really help and it kind of makes me biased but i can't go after this movie it's one of those things that simply aren't as good as i remember my tastes have changed since then i kinda just like dumb less grounded things now battle la brings me back to that time when super serious fps gamer fuel was all the rage a simpler time that thought it was much cooler than it really was in battle la certainly thought it was pretty cool let's take back los angeles [Music] you

Channel: PointlessHub

Views: 2,805,179

Keywords: Battle LA, Battle Los Angeles, Battle Los Angeles the Peak of Gaming, Battle Los Angeles PointlessHub, Knowing Better Battle Los Angeles, Knowing Better Starship Troopers, AlternateHistoryHub Battle LA, Modern Warfare 2, Peak of Gaming, Modern Warfare trilogy, Battle Los Angeles review, Battle LA Retrospective, Modern Warfare retrospective, Film review, PointlessHub, movie retrospective

Id: WHkednE7TPk

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021