Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-07-04 (Friday - The 4th of July!!)

On Jul 6, 2025 at 10:45:34 AM PDT, "Arthur Lipscomb"
<arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

Skyline (4K disc) 2011 sci-fi movie about a group of people in a Los
Angeles apartment trying to survive an alien invasion of Earth. The
only good bits of the movie are the few scenes where we get to see the
military fighting the aliens. The first dog fight where they nuke the
alien ship is particular good, but I'll bite my tongue on what happens
next. But whenever the movie focuses on the civilians it tends to get
dumb. One scene I noticed had the civilians watching as fighter jets
were battling the aliens. One of the fighters went down and crash so
close that they literally had to duck to keep from getting hit, then the
plane blew up a few feet from them. This is a military fighter jet
exploding a few feet from two people standing out in the open, and
immediately after they stood up without a scratch on them. If only the
movie had focused on the military fighting the aliens instead of the
people in the high rise building, it would have been so much better.

I went to a 4th of July party this weekend at the condo complex in Marina del
Rey where that whole movie was filmed! I kept telling myself to remember not
to look out the windows if anything unexpected should occur.

Battle: Los Angeles (blu-ray) 2011 Sci-fi movie about an alien invasion
of Earth that focuses on a platoon of Marines lead by Aaron Eckhart, who
must battle their way through the streets of Los Angeles fighting the
invading aliens. The movie holds up well enough.

I could never get over that they shot this in Louisiana. If you're going to
essentially make L.A. a character
in your movie and put it in the title, you should actually film it in L.A.

Battleship (4K disc) 2012 sci-fi movie based on the board game.  A group
of young sailors must battle an alien invasion force at sea.  I know
this movie has a bad reputation, but I actually like it a lot.  I
especially like towards the end when in order to get back into the fight
they retrofit the USS Missouri and set sail with it along with some old
timers who still knew how to operate the ship.

I know you've expressed your love for this movie before but for me, there's a
limit to how absurd a movie can be before I really can't suspend the disbelief
anymore.

The sequence with the Missouri was such a bizarre plot development on so many
levels. The ship has been stripped of all its engines and the barrels are all
that's left of those big guns. All the breaches and internal firing mechanisms
are long gone. But even if we were to assume that all of that equipment was
still inexplicably in place and functional, why would a floating museum be
fully fueled? And where did all the ammo for the guns come from? The powder
bags that fire those guns weigh 660 pounds and are loaded in by crane. Are we
supposed to assume the Navy was storing live ammo for the 16-inch guns on
board just for the hell of it? And even if we assume all of that, the final
cherry on that ridiculous sundae was how all those octogenarian geezers were
apparently just hanging out on the masts and yardarms of the ship in dramatic
poses for... what? Hawaii is under attack by space aliens, so all the
80-year-old WWII vets psychically decide at the same moment to go down to
Pearl Harbor and pose dramatically on their old ship?

It was just too, too, too much for this viewer to 'just go with it'. The movie
wouldn't have been any more ridiculous at that point if Taylor Kitch had
suddenly and inexplicably become Superman and started flying around killing
the aliens with his laser-beam eyes or something.