The New Year's Battle

The Battle: Los Angeles teaser draws some interesting connections.  They're well trodden elsewhere (in The X-Files, for instance), but crystalized here.  The sad, synthesized voice singing what sounds like bad poetry ("the stars go dim and the skies turn black") sets an atmosphere of doom as the title cards delve into the premonitory. "There are patterns that cannot be explained."  "There are warnings that cannot be ignored."  At this point the teaser hovers among signifiers that have not yet added up to what the film is ostensibly about, which is rather dull: aliens invade earth!  Let's not go there yet.  Let's play with how the signifiers allude to a history of the present.

At the limits of our understanding, in the ignored periphery of our lives, there are patterns.  We ignore them because life must go on, but they are actually warnings.  The costs of the reproduction of humanity have been building up neglected for too long, we have been too careless, too sinful some might say, for too long.  Witness global climate change, and every other impending environmental catastrophe.  Witness the economic recession.  We know that things are falling apart, we feel it.  But what can we do?  So many things are outside our grasp.  We know so little and can do so little.

With these anxieties in mind the need for an alien invasion becomes apparent.  Standing in for everything outside human limitation, the aliens are a tangible threat. We can fight aliens.  As they drop on smoking trails to earth, there is something pleasurable about the destruction.  Kept on edge for so long about what we don't know, finally what we've been afraid is here to relieve us.

The last three title cards play on the film as an event that depicts what will be the present.  "In 2011 nothing can prepare you for what comes next."  "You" refers to both the future audience of the film and the people it will depict struggling to survive.  But the statement wouldn't really work without an angst about the coming year.

Watching the trailer is like being allowed to give up.  It's beautiful.  I mean, I guess.  The movie, on the other hand, doesn't look like it will be nearly so compelling.