Battlefield: Los Angeles (Spoilers)

Actors

First off I would like to say that I think Aaron Eckhart is a great actor. He was great in The Dark Knight and Thank You For Smoking as well as his other films, and he was also good in
Battlefield: Los Angeles, but I felt that they should of went with somebody else. Now I don't have anybody in particular to replace him but for some reason, at least for me it seemed like it didn't just quite fit him in this role.

Also, I think Michelle Rodriguez is a great actress as well, and I enjoyed her other films. Though I don't have any personal gripes as to her in this movie, it just caught me as odd. Usually she plays a rather up front or "in your face" type of character if I used the right expression, and in BF:LA it just seemed like if she wasn't such a big named actress, it would of been rather easy to completely forget her character existed. She was just so under spoken and just kind of seemed to "be there" just for either aesthetics or to appeal to the females in the audience. Granted her character seemed to provide some theory discussion(would theorycrafting be right to use here?) as to the HQ of the LA invasion.

I don't have much else to say about the other actors in the movie though. I don't recognize most of them, and the only guy that really seemed to stand out to me was LCpl. Peter Kerns, the person that played him kind of reminded me of one of the guys from Friday Night Lights, although I haven't seen that movie in a long while so I could, and most likely am wrong.

Audio

I thought the audio, even though nothing special was pretty well done. I don't remember thinking at any point that something sounded obviously fake. Of course I've never been in the military or combat so I don't know if bullets actually make a "pew pew" sound when hitting something close to you. I personally liked how you never had to turn the audio up for the talking portions of the movie and turn it down during the combat portions like alot of movies now adays I seem to have to do it to, it just seemed really well balanced.

One thing I have to give the people behind the audio for BF:LA credit for is their background audio. Now maybe you can only hear it with surround sound or with your volume way up, but I noticed little subtle pops and cracks in the background. Not the sound your speakers make when they go out but I mean from the actual movie itself. During the quiet parts where the group moves down the residential areas or when they're being held up somewhere, it was nice in my opinion to hear the snaps and pops of gunfire off in the distance as I felt it helped draw me into the movie more.

Story

I thought the story over-all was really good. Not too much to leave a whole bunch of stupid questions that felt like they needed to be answered, but not to little where it feels like it's only the action. The basic premise of the story was solid, but seemed rather typical; sent in to rescue people, things go horribly wrong, mission changes.

The main thing for me that seemed to deter me from being fully immersed in the film I think however is some of the conversations between the marines seemed either random at times, or like they tried to get those "Black Hawk Down" or "Courage Under Fire" moments in and it just didn't seem to fit quite right. Like one scene where one of the Marines is pissed off because his friends are dead, and the guy next to him instead of saying something about the loss of their friends just tells him that he will survive to see his wife and what not. Just didn't seem like it was the right response to an anger breakdown, that to me seemed more like a response you'd give somebody if they had been shot and they're about to die.

With that said however, they did have some rather good moments in it that to me made me feel either more revved up, or connected to the character or situations. Either way, I still feel that the story was rather solid and was good enough at least in my opinion, to draw me in and want to watch it a second and third time.