Michelle Rodriguez gets to kick some more alien butt this year in 'Battle Los Angeles'

Credit: Sony Pictures

"Battle: Los Angeles" looks cool.

No two ways about it.  The film obviously deals with a street-level view of an alien invasion that seems to take place around the world, although the film mainly seems focused on the Los Angeles battlefront.  Aaron Eckhart's the big action lead, and Bridget Moynihan is the face of civilian terror, part of a group that Eckhart is trying to keep alive in the film.

The teaser trailer made its impression by offering up a very stylized first glimpse at the film, and the new trailer offers up more narrative, but it also builds to a very particular point and then drops out in a way that is uncommon.  It's a bold ending to a trailer.

My guess is that this is the last trailer we see for the film.  It's a spring release, and this makes it look like a huge-scale film with a nice sense of SF reality.  I worked on a film for Revolution that dealt with civilian and military reactions to an invasion of Earth, and there are a lot of common ideas being dealt with in what we're seeing in this trailer.  I'm glad someone got one of these made at this size.  This is a cool approach to updating the old '50s invasion films, and I like the glimpses we've had of the alien culture so far.  I'm curious to see how well the human story works, because that's the real key.  If this film delivers on the emotional side, it looks like the visceral is absolutely pinned down already.

It's funny that this trailer would premiere at the same time that Variety, hiding behind their paywall, breaks the news that Fox is going to be working with producer Peter Chernin to bring the Atari game "Missile Command" to the bigscreen.

My guess is that "Missile Command" on the bigscreen would look a hell of a lot like that scene on the beach in the "Battle: Los Angeles" trailer, don't you think?

"Battle: Los Angeles" will invade theaters March 11, 2011.