Guilty Pleasures - Battle: Los Angeles

I'm going public with my answer to xkcd's challenge in #2184 "Unpopular Opinions:

Unpopular positive opinion challenge:

Name a movie that...

1. You genuinely like (not "so bad it's good")
2. Came out in your adult life post-2000, and
3. Is rated below 50% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Randall (xkcd's author) came up with Terminator: Genisys which as of today has a 26% rating on the Tomatometer (critic ratings) and 52% on the Popcornmeter (user ratings).

For me, it's...

Battle: Los Angeles

I do dislike that I can't use a colon to indicate my choice because there's also one in the title, and I'll admit to routinely abbreviating it to "Battle: LA".

I genuinely like the movie (more on that below)

Randall is only a year older than me and the movie came out in 2011 (I first saw it later on a streaming service)

Below 50% on both Rotten Tomatoes ratings!

Why I like it

For starters, I've had a soft spot for Aaron Eckhart ever since I first saw Thank You for Smoking (86% Tomatometer).

But it's also a good war movie because it avoids a lot of my normal pet peeves:

• People take cover. Not only that, the aliens take cover when they're not firing!
• People use more than infantry rifles: tanks, armored personnel carriers, air support, recoilless rifles, grenades... One of my favorite early scenes is one of the Marines freaking out that the aliens are resisting rifle fire. The Staff Sergeant leading chews him out, and then has a Marine drop a grenade in the alien's hiding place and moves everyone out. In the words of different cinema, "Let's show these freaks what a bloated, runaway military budget can do." 
• The aliens are actual threats. Although it's not addressed much in the script, the aliens lay ambushes, evacuate their own wounded when under fire, use their own armored vehicles and aircraft.

So in general it's got a nice character-arc for Aaron Eckhart, lots of things blow up good, and almost nobody on either side needs to be a complete idiot for the movie to work. There is one bit where a TV report speculates that the aliens have invaded to steal Earth's liquid water, which makes zero sense, but we can chalk this up to the talking head not knowing anything rather than the aliens' actual motivation.

Conclusion

It's not a great film: although the characters are a little differentiated, it's not much. And there's a lot of shaky-cam which I could do without. But it deserves more love than it got.

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