The sci-fi movie Roger Ebert called an “insult” to the genre: “Noisy, violent, ugly and stupid”
It would be unprofessional for someone who makes their living reviewing movies to hold a grudge against any particular genre, even if the evidence was there that Roger Ebert hated bad horror and turgid sci-fi more than miserable films in other forms.
That’s not to say he went into every screening of a fresh blood-soaked nightmare or far-flung journey beyond the stars ready, willing, and eager to tear them apart, because plenty of horror and sci-fi flicks received glowing praise from the legendary critics during his long and distinguished career.
However, when it was done wrong, Ebert didn’t hold back. Some of the most scathing reviews he ever wrote zeroed in on the two genres, and he seemed to relish picking their failings apart, which was often pretty easy because many of the worst offenders had no shortage of options to choose from.
When sci-fi is done right, it can yield some of the greatest, most influential, eye-popping, awe-inspiring, or lucrative films in history. When it’s done wrong, though, it’s almost unbearable, with Ebert going so far as to call one example that irritated him from its first to last frame as so bad it was an insult to the entire medium.
“Battle: Los Angeles is noisy, violent, ugly, and stupid,” Ebert began a 0.5-star review of Jonathan Liebesman’s tedious blockbuster. “Its manufacture is a reflection of appalling cynicism on the part of its makers, who don’t even try to make it more than senseless chaos. Here’s a science-fiction film that’s an insult to the words ‘science’ and fiction’, and the hyphen in between them.”
Ebert must have been seething when the movie earned over $200 million at the box office, even if he wasn’t the only one who gave it a drubbing. Still, the promise of a documentary-style alien invasion adventure following a group of ill-equipped soldiers trying to repel an extraterrestrial onslaught evidently had plenty of pull among the general cinemagoing public.
As for the aliens themselves? It’s an understatement to say that he didn’t find the creatures he described as “like stick figures whipped up by apprentice animators” convincing, going so far as to ask if they awarded Razzies for special effects. They don’t, but he thinks Battle: Los Angeles deserved one anyway.
Showering the woeful shoot ’em up with such wonderful descriptors as “lazy,” “a mess,” “nothing makes sense,” and “incomprehensible,” Ebert despised the film so much that he wanted to “rend the hair from my head and weep bitter tears of despair” when thinking back to action-orientated pictures that were built upon the “elegant construction” of in-camera geometry and geography, with Gunfight at the OK Corral the example that came to mind.
He even issued a warning that if young men attended “this crap” with their friends and some of them enjoyed it, it was their job to “tactfully inform them they are idiots.” As for young women who were hoodwinked into attending Battle: Los Angeles as a date movie, he urged them to “consider spending some time apart” from their potential paramours.
