Battle: Los Angeles isn’t a remake, but chances are you’ve seen pretty much everything in it before. An alien invasion flick shot in jittery, faux-newsreel style, it serves up a smorgasbord of lamely repackaged movie moments ripped off from other, better films—and little else. Movie geeks who want to play spot-the-reference will at least have something to keep them busy.

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, where "the drugs began to take hold" in the Johnny Depp adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." In the manic, animated "Rango," which stars Depp as a chameleon, our coordinates are similar, and the hallucinogens are well under way.