Battle: LA is not the movie depicted in the Battle: LA trailer, because that movie in the trailer looks kind of awesome. Battle: LA is in fact a much inferior film that takes place in the boring and insignificant fringes of the fantastic-looking movie implied by that artfully constructed trailer.

Battle: LA isn’t unique in this deceptive marketing practice, of course. Cutting dishonest trailers has become a kind of filmmaking in its own right. In this market where any studio film has 3 days to earn back its money or risk being pulled from theaters, it doesn’t matter if you feel lied to after they get your 12 dollars. It only matters that your 12 dollars are safely in studio hands, and that your ass was in a theater seat opening weekend. I used to seek out trailers, but their content has become so untethered to the films they represent that now I just watch them to see how profoundly they betray their source material.

So, in the trailer for Battle:LA we have a pitched battle over Santa Monica between ominous looking spaceships and every soldier the Southland could spare. The panoramic carnage reminds one of nothing so much as the first few moments of “Saving Private Ryan.’ Our forces are clearly outgunned, bravely confronting a lost cause. There is an electro-dirge playing over the last half of the trailer, complete with a sad robot vocal, and this dirge pushes out all the sound and fury of the war onscreen. It’s hard not to get a few goosebumps. The movie I constructed in my head after watching the preview was awesome.

Sadly, the movie I was subjected to is less than awesome. Much less.

First, the action we follow is NOT the battle for LA. Drink that in for a moment. The vast majority of the actual skirmish happens offscreen. Ain’t that some bullshit?

The group of Marines we’re cinematically embedded with isn’t tasked with fighting aliens and saving West Los Angeles. Their job is to rescue some stragglers who ignore the evacuation request. This means that the movie we’re watching will spend most of the ninety minutes skulking around the edges of the action, doing their best to avoid the enemy. The filmmakers seem to know they don’t have the skills to pull off this plotline (ganked from Private Ryan as well, one imagines.) To make up for their lack of skill and pathos, they gin up an unending series of arbitrary deadlines “24” style. We have X minutes to find the stragglers! We have X minutes to leave this location! We must meet up with X at X in X or X will happen!

Beyond just larding up the movie with shots of Marines checking their various timepieces, this contrivance also has the effect of turning the movie into an expensive “Rainbow Six” ripoff complete with save points, arbitrary missions and unimaginative break-ins to add new information. The characters are about as well-defined as standard videogame heroes, too. At more than one point I thought it would be more fun to play this than to continue watching it.

Most of the coverage of the film centers on the portrayal of Marines in the movie, and where you stand on that probably will come down to your feelings on product placement in general. The movie clearly got some cooperation from the Marines, like many military-themed movies do. That consideration probably affected the way Marines were presented, but it’s so far from the worst thing about this movie that I don’t particularly care. It’s true that there are some crowbarred-in moments that feel like a recruitment video, but for all I know that could have been part of the movie’s DNA from its inception.

I can’t really recommend this movie. I went in with high hopes, and they were dashed right away. Some of the effects are pretty great-looking, and I have grown to love watching Michelle Rodriguez scowling at things, but ultimately this is a survival-mode first-person-shooter that never gels into a film with anything to say. I’d save it for a plane ride. Probably your next one, as it’s unlikely to stick around in theaters once people start talking to each other. I mean, if the studio had real confidence in it, they would have released it in May, not March.

For reference, here’s the trailer that Battle: LA doesn’t live up to.