There’s a teaser trailer out for Sony’s Battle: Los Angeles, and man, nothing good is happening in LA.

The set of Battle: Los Angeles is the first I ever visited on behalf of CHUD. I’m still on the side of an embargo wall that prevents me from saying anything, but it’s become clear that there’a big challenge ahead for a film that was shot a year ago, yet is being released in an increasingly flooded market, as a number of smaller, similar films have rushed out ahead. In fact, this very weekend sees Skyline hitting theaters (though word isn’t great, and they didn’t screen it heavily for critics it seems), and just yesterday I reported on two possible victims to the glut of alien invasion films. Battle: Los Angeles will still be among the first of the new wave of true blockbuster-style alien invasion films, and the trailer promises a visually strong movie, if nothing else.

Foregoing dialogue and giving only hints at the plot, the teaser is a moody piece set to Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “The Sun’s Gone Dim and the Sky’s Turned Black” (which you can listen to here). There’s the typical news reports and large scale effects shots, but you also get a flavor for ground-level, personal military focus of the film. Battle: Los Angeles focuses on a specific unit of marines that react to a very sudden invasion against an enemy that obviously seems quite capable of kicking some major human ass. I’m not sure how things turn out at the end of the film, but LA is going to have a lot more than traffic jams and heat waves to deal with if we win.

If you look carefully (or take a look at the screenshot [COMING] below) you can catch a good look at one of the individual aliens, and they seem fairly humanoid, in what could be biomechanical armor. I’m as in the dark as you about the nature and look of the aliens themselves, so it’ll be interesting getter increasingly clear looks at what our boys and girls in the beige camo will be up against.

One of these days I’ll be able to give you an idea of what I saw out in Baton Rouge, LA (which seems to have stood in for Los Angeles-proper fairly effectively), as well as bring you some cool interviews. Look for that later, but for now you can watch the trailer in the embed below, or download it at Apple Trailers. The film stars Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Bridget Moynahan,  musician Ne-Yo, and Michael Pena. Directed by Jonathan Liebesman, I have to say he’s showing a lot more directorial promise than we might have guessed from his previous light workman horror movies (Darkness Falls, Texas Chainsaw: Beginning).

The film hits March 11th, 2011.