Saving Sergeant Nantz
Battle: Los Angeles
Directed by Jonathan
Liebesman
Runtime: 116 min.
Three meaningful
visual symbols are connected in Battle:
Los Angeles. The first: A soldier sees a jar of mints on an officer’s desk
(“They’re pretty old”), and he reaches in and grabs a handful. Second: Cut
immediately to soldiers visiting a military cemetery with tombstones splayed
across a hillside like fallen tablets. Finally: Fresh from combat, Staff Sgt.
Nantz (Aaron Eckhart) sees a supply table stocked with ammunition and grabs a
handful of bullets for the next round of fighting. These moments distinguish Battle: Los Angeles from a mindless
action movie about aliens attacking Planet Earth. Beneath the silly premise is
a consistent depiction of military performance, duty and sacrifice that is so
unexpected that the film’s genre transforms from fantasy to war movie.
When you put the
equation of candy-death-bullets in context, it evokes the ambiguity of our
leisure culture’s fascination with violent movies and video games and,
conversely, reproves our media culture’s pervasive distaste for all things
military. Despite Battle: Los Angeles’
indulgence of apocalyptic thrills, its determined dramatization of how mankind
(specifically, Americans) rally against outside threat addresses a more
interesting reality than the insipid, confused, sociological metaphor of District 9. This film reveals the
reality of America’s Centrist-Conservative not Passive-Liberal ideology; the
cheering audience it appeals to (and very subtly, soberly instructs)
intuitively responds to the necessity for action and self-defense. Their
instincts are not fooled by trendy pieties.
Director Jonathan
Liebesman and screenwriters Christopher Bertolini play out a more credible
hypothesis than the intergalactic attack movie Independence Day; they update
the idea of invasion with post-9/11 consciousness. The enemy is mostly unseen
(a lame plot) but an unseen enemy is also an abstract Enemy. Yet the fighting
forces are familiar and recognizable. Led by Sgt. Nantz (“We all wish our men
made it home after Iraq.”), they personify up-to-date, post-Iraq-surge bravery
that movies like In the Valley of Elah,
Courage Under Fire, Stop-Loss, The Hurt Locker and Avatar have undervalued by cynically undermining recent foreign
policy.
Hollywood’s new
clinical pacifism defines war as psychologically aberrant (“War is a drug,”
according to The Hurt Locker). But
Nantz and his largely Latino, black, female troops and protected civilians
represent a mobilized home front. They stir an almost primordial, old-fashioned
heroism idealized in Nantz’s square-jawed Marine. Eckhart’s intensity in this
Nick Fury role is as surprising as the belligerent aliens given his usual
indie-movie diffidence. The troops note his John Wayne swagger but Eckhart
hones Nantz’s commitment. “You made a decision with your guts,” he defends an
insecure officer. “There was no right or wrong!” His words and manner sharpen
military thinking with unfashionable clarity, made credible by his Petraeus/McChrystal
bone structure.
Not all movies swing
toward Liberal consensus and Battle: Los
Angeles veers away from hip pessimism (Tupac and Dr. Dre’s “Shake it, baby!”
chorus from the song “California Love” opens the film) and trendy skepticism
(“One thing is clear, the world is at war!” blares alarmist news media). It
answers all cynicism with a rousing salute to the valor of the expendable
legion. This could only happen effectively in a movie that didn’t set out to
memorialize. The worst parts of Battle:
Los Angeles are its similarity to the new style of post-9/11 anarchy:
violent action scenes that distort and distract the reality of catastrophe—as
the degraded TV-news video of the invasion sets the tone and exposes the
problem.
Messy,
indecipherable action scenes repeat the ironic disengagement of both post-9/11
movies and escapist videogames (from WarCraft,
BlackOps to Cloverfield, District 9, Vanishing,
The Host, Splinter, Monsters, etc.).
But then Liebesman & Co. pull redemption out of this pretend fog of war.
After two hours of clichéd, swish-pan, digital-muck, they arrive at a sequence
of Saving Private Ryan daylight (featuring Nantz’s bullet-grab) that gives
clarity to the cultural import of action and war films. Battle Los Angeles
combines a Michael Bay concept (Armageddon meets Pearl Harbor) with a Spielberg
historical reality. Remember when the Pentagon asked Hollywood screenwriters to
devise possible terrorist scenarios after 9/11? They couldn’t have expected
better than this.