Summary
As aliens invade Earth, a squad of marines led by a retiring officer do their best to survive the onslaught while rescuing civilians. The aliens are rumored to have come looking for water, but the planet is already inhabited by humans.
Interest
Of all the early-2010s invasion films, this one is my favorite. From first watch, I was enamored with the design of the aliens. Their physiology, their surgically-installed machine parts, and so on. I always wanted to know more, so I dove deep.
It is also one of the rare films where it more obviously shows the flaw of human nature – that is, to destroy anything we do not know or understand. To respond with lethal force and not think about how the other side might also value things like community, family, survival, et cetera. For me, these aliens are the better species of the two based on what is shown. They clearly wouldn’t rather be here, instead seeming to need the water out of desperation. Imagine if humans were in desperate need and got turned away by an alien species who said “nah, kill them all, it’s our territory.”
Research
One thing I looked for was additional artwork. I found an artist website who included several images in their portfolio. Several images of the aliens were shown, including the pre-surgery design indicating that these aliens used to be 100% organic. It begs the question: Why are they surgically-altered now? Was it another species who was enslaving them and/or performing experiments, or did they do it to themselves to survive? These sorts of story details are incredibly rare when it comes to humans writing stories about aliens.
There was an official website, which I attempted to scrape around 2022. The site was flash-based, and I recovered many of the individual flash files. Most of them don’t play in a Flash player, probably because they are trying to connect to the internet or adjacent flash files which can’t occur in a standalone flash player. By using tools like FFDec (a Flash decompiler), it is possible to restore some of these or at least view and extract the individual assets. This includes canonical information, images, video, and sounds. I hope to find more in a future attempt.
There is a Blu-ray disc which includes some bonus features. I own a copy.
There was a game, but it is incredibly hard to locate as it has been delisted for a very long time. I have played it – there’s some incredible potential, but as with Battleship it was mired by poor budget and a team that wasn’t equipped to bring out the best of Battle LA’s world.