No Battle: LA thread? *SPOILERS*

What's weird is that there are so many truly cool alien invasion novels in the science fiction pantheon. Why can't anyone just throw twenty grand at one of those authors for the rights and adapt one of those? We really don't have to keep remaking War of the Worlds and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we can try one of the others.

I'd rather see a Ringworld movie than another alien invasion one, but that's just me. *shrug*

I always liked Footfall (US builds an Orion to fight them) but it'll be too strange for the general public to succeed.

The War Agaist of Chtorr series is also too unusual for the general public due to the unique way the Earth is invaded. Of course you could say the same thing about the movie version of The Day of the Triffids but at least Triffids' movie had an upbeat ending, at least on a small scale, where all of the Chtorr novels are just depressing.

For the folks saying "It was just a scientist guessing that the aliens want our water...", there's a few things in (or related to) B:LA that *try* to explain why the aliens are here for our water, and specifically invading:

1 - The scientist guy that mentions the ocean's draining specifically points out that our water is in liquid form, and that water is only found in frozen form everywhere else in the universe. Why bother collecting and processing little frozen comets when earth is a giant bucket of ready-to-use liquid?
2 - When the marines are tearing into the alien soldier to figure out how to kill it, the helmets it is wearing combined with the fluid that keeps splashing out of it implies that it is a water-based (or at least water-reliant) life form. This is not expressly said, though.
3 - I saw an interview on G4 where Aaron Eckerhard says "...well they're here for our water, so..."
4 - When they show that an alien soldier has his weapon surgically attached to him, for me, it indicates that they are really commited to combat and war. This could mean that they are not a "let's ask the humans for some water" kind of race, more a "let's kill those f***ers and take their water" type of "people".

All that said, I enjoyed it. Yes the dialogue could have been better, and JEEZ those aliens built that CC fast , but over all it was fun. I enjoyed it more than Sucker Punch.

Thanks,

They actually said that water is frozen everywhere else in the universe? Wow, super retarded. Collecting comets and mining Europa may be a little more difficult than sticking a big tube in the Pacific, but there aren't any natives killing the guys with the giant straw.

If an alien species is looking for a new place to live and is inherently violent, then I can see killing the local populace in a way that leaves the place "move-in ready" rather than throwing an asteroid and obliterating the existing face of the planet. That said, it's just dumb to opt for hand-to-hand combat when they can just drop neutron bombs. At 10 times the amount of radiation released compared to regular atomic bombs, you kill off a lot more people, animals and plants with far less general blast damage. Wait a few months then take over. Or heck, just be a little patient and decode our language and figure out that 99% of the entire global civilization is completely dependent on oil and destroy the refineries. Civilization collapses, people turn on each other as food becomes scarce and then starve to death. Go off to mine the asteroids for whatever minerals you want then come back a few years later and set up camp.

So many better ways to do it.

I enjoyed the movie for what it was, an action/popcorn flick.. Though the shaky cam made me a bit nauseous.. I was able to tolerate it (unlike District 9, the shaky cam in that movie literally made me sick to my stomach, accompanied by vomiting)...

I thought the water thing was a bit silly though.. Especially when the scientist guy said we had the only liquid water in the Universe.. What? I doubt that..

Also, they stated that the aliens already caused a noticeable drop in the ocean level. In what, 24 hours? If that were the case, then they'd suck our ocean dry relatively quickly, meaning it probably wouldn't of been worth invading Earth to begin with.

^Indeed, it almost felt like an after thought to me.. Like the writers had this story all thrown together, then one said "wait, why are the aliens invading earth in the first place?"