Tell it to the Marines

source

"Battle: Los Angeles"
PG-13
116 minutes
2011

Aliens from space prove to be much better space travelers than humyns, but only
marginally better fighters--a far-fetched premise. A small squad of Marines led
by a staff sergeant defeats the aliens and retrieves Los Angeles from
occupation.

This particular film rejects MIM's premise that aliens from outer space are much
more advanced than us and would likely be communists. The assumption again is that
the aliens do not talk, and just want our resources through death of our
species--perfect fodder for a war movie.

CNN reports in the film that the Earth is being colonized/occupied. That was a
good way to turn these hate-the-aliens films on their head. For once, the shoe
is on the other foot for whitey.

The political question about this film will be whether it oddly inspires the
oppressed nations to fight U.$. imperialism or whether it will be more bad than
good as yet another prop for the Marines. Given that the United $tates is
already militarism-saturated, there might be unintended consequences when
foreign audiences watch this film.

In a desperate firefight with the aliens, an injured Amerikan lieutenant rigs
himself up as a suicide-bomber and succeeds in his mission. Not only that, he
blows up an empty bus in the process. The bus was empty, because humyn civilians
and troops had left it and there are no alien civilians in the film. The aliens
all count as soldiers.

In real life, there are countries that draft everybody. There may be reverb for
those countries watching this film.

On the whole, without seeing global scientific survey results on the impact, I'd
have to guess that the impact of this film is mostly negative. It's another
glorification of militarism in which the "bad guys" don't even have civilians.