3/10
The best thing you can say about this film is that it is better than Skyline, which also described an alien attack. The worst thing you can say is that it incorporates several major American preoccupations, all of them disturbing.
It also has that annoying and pointless habit that so many films have, of starting and then abruptly returning to the recent past (24 hours earlier). It makes no sense. The story, such as it is, concerns a bunch of soldiers who have to try to rescue a few civilians from a police station. The reason? Well, there's been an all out assault on the city (and most of the rest of the world) by enormously sophisticated alien machines who do not come in peace. The only thing standing between then and total wipe out is tough-as-nails Staff Sergeant Aaron Eckhart, who is given a token back story, in order to generate a modicum of human interest. Not that there is much in the way of humanity going on here.
For this is a film wholly dedicated to imitating a computer game, and - I assume - being turned into one. Essentially, it's nearly 2 hours of things going bang, crash, kerpow and any other words that are meant to sound like heavy weapons being discharged. The aliens shoot at the soldiers, the soldiers shoot back. Then we have a five minute time out for peace and quiet, and are supposed to care about some kid called Hector losing his dad, and then it's back to crash bang wallop again. The whole process is at once very familiar and deeply depressing.
Not because I think the film will be especially successful, but because the film is like an advert for the American way of death. Foreigners/aliens attack us without warning. We respond with maximum force (this is a film where weapons are like sexual fetishes). They seem to be too strong for us, but with a mixture of canny cunning and sheer determination, we prevail. And the whole thing is one big game, making it that much easier for the Great American Public to accept that most, if not all problems are a) caused by Someone Else and b) can be solved with a lot of violence. This is two hours of your life you don't need to spend in a cinema.
