Battle royale

The tentative release date is a decidedly non-blockbustery Feb. 18, 2011. But right now Battle: Los Angeles is the hottest film to shoot principal photography in Baton Rouge since cast and crew for All The King’s Men descended on the Red Stick in 2005.

Topping the bill is Aaron Eckhart, a once-journeyman actor with several solid roles to his credit, but few that earned him mainstream popularity until he breathed honest-to-God passion into the role of Harvey “Two-Face” Dent in last year’s megahit The Dark Knight. The Christopher Nolan-directed Batman entry is the second-highest-grossing movie of all time, a fact that cannot be underestimated when looking at any film Eckhart headlines from here on out. That the 41-year-old star was the top choice for the lead in a sci-fi action movie at all is probably due to his contribution to the success of The Dark Knight.

In September Battle director Jonathan Liebesman let slip that Eckhart’s Marine Sergeant Nantz is more Dirty Harry than John Rambo when he leads a group of resistance soldiers in a counter-assault against alien forces intent on seriously redressing the real estate balance along the California coastline and probably further inland as well.

But can Eckhart really channel his inner Eastwood? Even while holding a revolver to a young boy’s head, the blonde, honest-faced actor made revenge-minded “Two-Face” a truly tragic figure by the end of The Dark Knight. As Nick Naylor in Jason Reitman’s pre-Juno Big Tobacco satire Thank You for Smoking, Eckhart made the charismatic nicotine pusher come across as a guy you’d want to watch a ball game with, not picket vehemently against with the Truth contingent.

Eckhart, his hair now shaved down to a military cut, downplayed the Dirty Harry comparison to MTV. But if he can pull off a dangerous anti-hero in Baton Rouge, then Battle: Los Angeles will be all the better for it.

In a post-District 9 landscape, fans, even the nerdiest of sci-fi ones, want more realism and less fantasy from their movies. Glitzy, epic Godzilla was 1998—and awful. Digital, shaky-cam Cloverfield was 2008. Pretty good! Based on a read-through of a leaked early version of Chris Bertolini’s screenplay, Battle: Los Angeles is already headed in the right direction.

After Eckhart signed on, Bridget Moynahan, Michelle Rodriguez and Michael Peńa followed suit. Pre-production was well underway in Shreveport when R&B star Ne-Yo was cast, too. It’s an intriguing group likely capable of a unique chemistry, but the film will either feel like a tense thriller or a ridiculous throwaway depending on Liebesman’s direction.

This is the man Paramount is trusting with its ambitious reimagining of Homer’s epic The Odyssey as a gritty revenge movie. Sure, he made Darkness Falls and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, but then something interesting happened. His work started turning heads—and not just because pretty young things were running from murdering psychopaths in his movies. Liebesman’s latest indie picture, The Killing Room, attracted a quality cast—including Chloe Sevigny, Timothy Hutton and Nick Cannon—and reeled in a ton of buzz at Sundance, not exactly a run-of-the-mill result at the renowned festival for a thriller about a secret government research study gone wrong.

Liebesman, like Eckhart, is on the upswing. Eckhart can be seen next opposite Johnny Depp in the Hunter Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary.

When completed, Battle: Los Angeles probably won’t be an odds-on favorite for any non-technical Academy Awards, but based on the screenplay it will be a wild ride. It’s a throwback, hell-on-Earth disaster flick that manages to take itself seriously, but not too much so—like the laborious retreads The Road and 2012, both in theaters this month.

No, this is exactly the kind of picture Quentin Tarantino will be positioning himself to remake in 20 years time while he tries to resurrect the career of Ricky—excuse me—Richard Schroeder.

Shooting at Celtic Media Centre wraps Dec. 10. For more information on Battle: Los Angeles, visit sonypictures.com/movies.