Battle: Los Angeles, about a platoon of marines defending L.A. from hostile extraterrestrials, comes to Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday 14. (It will be on demand widely just two weeks later, on June 28.) Since watching the alien invasion flick is akin to tallying up figures—like, say, potential box-office receipts or vast lines of computer code or money basically being burned onscreen—we decided to take a mathematical approach to assessing its value. Below, we crunch the numbers so you don’t have to.
161 Explosions
8 Shots of American flags blowing in the wind
4 Shots of ticking clocks
13 Ominous news stories playing in the background
2 Cities filling in for Los Angeles (Shreveport and Baton Rouge)
0 Recognizable Los Angeles landmarks
2 Onscreen civilian casualties
1,785,312 Offscreen civilian casualties (estimate)
1 Alien autopsies performed to determine enemy’s weakness
0 Times that information regarding enemy’s weakness is put to use in battle
1 Little kids made honorary marines
5 Times that Michelle Rodriguez has basically played this part: at least