Working off that swirling, deliberate Friday Night Lights-kinda camera approach, Jonathan Liebesman's aboveboard space-invasion movie tells the oldest story in the extraterrestrial colonization book — the damn aliens want our natural resources, and us humans are gonna scrap till the end! But while same-genre flicks like Independence Day solidify their cheeseball status the second they CGI-implode recognizable national monuments, Battle: Los Angeles does an admirable job humanizing the fictional struggle — it’s a bit of a military fetish piece, yes, but an entertaining and well-paced one. Marine Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart), a commander scarred by the tragic end to his last tour in Iraq, is ready to hang up his helmet when he’s called back into duty to move civilians away from an impending "meteor storm." The meteors, of course, turn out to be clusters of hostile humanoid lifeforms hellbent on exterminating every screaming Californian that gets in their metal-plated way. Nantz, thrown into command of an unfamiliar platoon that’s populated by capable young actors (and Ne-Yo!) working off pencil-sketch soldier archetypes (the jittery one, the angry one, the wise-cracking one, etc.), leads a campaign through scorched Santa Monica to rescue stranded civilians, taking heavy hits from the mysterious enemy along the way. It's a Point A to Point B movie, but the getting there is a pure sci-fi squealfest, Christopher Bertolini's oft-hammy script notwithstanding. (UA Grant, UA Riverview, Pearl)