Two days ago, cheap Tuesday at Odeon opened up the possibilities of super cinema as with the afternoon off, I could indulge in more movies than usual. I settled on Battlefield Los Angeles for mid-afternoon as I knew it would be a hard sell to get Altaa to come and then, when I got home, gave her the decision whether to watch The King’s Speech (again, but it was a wonderful film) at 8.30 pm or The Adjustment Bureau at 9.20 pm.
Battlefield Los Angeles (hereafter BLA) is a lot better than I expected. Dealing with the hoary concept of alien invasion, it had a new take on it. Most disaster movies avoid Los Angeles (Volcano with Tommy Lee Jones being a notable exception), given that it has only one globally recognised symbol in the Hollywood Sign and a few name-recognition sites, like Beverley Hill, Hollywood itself, Venice Beach and South Central, though these are hard to visualise. If you’re going for impact, New York is a favourite (versions of which Superman, Batman and Spiderman and others, deem worth fighting to defend against from attack by their foes). On the West Coast, the Old World elegance of San Francisco is deemed ripe for destruction. LA just doesn’t have that cachet and secretly there are probably many who think it deserves annihilation. Perhaps for this reason a good many action movies are located in LA just so it can be smashed up, acting essentially as both anywheresville and nowheresville.
BLA plays it like an action flick but is in reality in the disaster camp as the arrival of the aliens is a true calamity for Earth. Talk of Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro falling and brief shots of “Britain, London facing destruction” and Germany (though surely that couldn’t be Berlin given its distance from the sea?) illustrates how widespread the threat to humanity is. International terrorism is only obliquely referenced but in post-9/11 days, as in Cloverfield, films depicting a merciless, unquantifiable enemy that poses a real threat to our way of life have a certain dynamic not present before 11th September 2001.
I must say, the alien strategy is deeply flawed (though I guess the humans had to have some sort of chance). There seems to have been little, if any, worthwhile reconnaissance. There are twenty separate focal points, yet three of them are in California, leaving seventeen for the rest of the world. They need to be near the sea (for sucking it up for some reason), so what about all those major population centres deep inland, like Moscow or Chengdu or Delhi? Unlike in Independence Day, instead of blitzing the human race from the skies before sending in ground troops, infantry are in the first line of the offensive – though innumerable, they are not invulnerable to high velocity bullets (despite having access to faster than light technology). They certainly have tremendous firepower but are open to explosive human attacks, especially from guided cruise missiles. If that’s the case, I would be surprised in the Russians and the Chinese did not use tactical nuclear weapons to drive back the interlopers because they have no forcefield shields. In terms of the context, it is akin to Hernan Cortes striking at the Aztec Empire, though that nearly ended with the conquistadors being wiped out, before they triumphed. Tactically, it is strictly First World War, as they seek to bludgeon their way forward, irrespective of their own casualties.
The characters involve mostly a platoon of US marines who have to enter enemy territory to rescue a group of civilians. They are fleshed out just enough for us to recognise when they are killed and care when that happens. Given that high-profile actors outside of Aaron Eckhart are kept to a minimum, you really don’t know who will be picked off next.
They pitch up at a wrecked police station after fighting their way in. They find several cowering civilians, two of them maybe aliens themselves with their Latino accents and that they are at a police station. It is left unsaid. Common humanity is the key. Of course, like the first season of 24 and death toll there, it seems a little unreasonable that so many marines lose their lives for a few civilians. The film answers this, by showing that had the marines held their base positions they would have been wiped out. To further justify the excursion, with the civilians safe, they go on to take on the regional command and control ‘asset’ of the aliens. Ultimately, humanity is given hope, but the real beating heart of any alien movie set on Earth is that despite their extra-terrestrial origins they represent aspects of the human experience – one commentator in BLA says the motives of the aliens are classic colonisation techniques. Some aliens are kind, others are cruel, but it is always through the prism of what humans think they or others would do in the same position.

Altaa chose, out of two options I presented her with (I wasn’t enamoured or enamoured enough of the other releases), The Adjustment Bureau. It was billed as Inception meets Bourne – it wasn’t in the same league as those films, but it was still worth the price of admission. It starred Matt Damon, who is working a good 1970s line in paranoid movies, with Emily Blunt blossoming as the female lead in a major Hollywood film as her career arc progresses upwards. Terence Stamp comes in late but cuts a forbidding presence. As to the others, there is fine ensemble acting.
The film concerns all those little things that happen in our lives but elude rational, plausible explanation. The members of the Adjustment Bureau ensure that our lives take the paths they were meant to, along the lines of ‘there’s a reason for everything’. They could be angels but they call themselves case officers. They work for the Chairman, who is not called God but the obvious implication is there. With a neat liberal twist, Damons’ character, David Norris, is told that regarding the Chairman, even if we didn’t recognise it, we’ve all met him – or her. It was probably thrown in to counteract that the fact that all the case officers are men, operating an unseen patriarchy.
One can tell the age of the novel, written by the renowned Phillip K. Dick, as it mentions how Norris’ father was a big fan of JFK and took his son to the senate gallery as a result, but JFK would have long since stopped being a senator (and alive for that matter) by the time Norris would have been born. It would made more sense to namecheck Bobby Kennedy or another liberal hero in Congress, though it is clever in not identifying Norris’s own political affiliations (Damon’s are well known). Stamp lectures about how mankind was guided from hunter-gatherers to the height of the Roman Empire, before the Bureau stepped back and the Dark Ages ensued, but it would have made more sense to talk of the height of the Roman and Han Empires (about 160 A.D. I’d say), not to mention having appeal in the Chinese market. In a way, as these are my two greatest quibbles, it goes to say that the rest of the motion picture is very enjoyable.
The greatest draw of the movie is how it can relate to all of us, all of those crossroads in life that at the time all available options were possible, but looking back the route taken seems set in stone. In a way, this is because we are slaves to our personalities – barring split-second decisions before we have a chance to think, what we go for is determined by who we are and even indecision is an unwitting course of action based on our ingrained mindset. And the Adjustment Bureau have a way of affecting that as well.