Battleship (2012)
Well, it wasn’t a bad movie. With some rewriting and editing, there is a
good movie just waiting to bubble to the surface. Battleship is loosely based on the board game
of the same name. Now, why did they
commission a movie to be related to the game?
One can’t really tell. It a
little or nothing to do with the board game.
Is the movie really bad? Nope, it is actually better than Revenge of
the Fallen, but somewhat above flicks like The Core (Sorry, MC). However, some of the acting from the human
cast members really brings this movie down a bit. Plus, there is an introduction scene to the
main character that I felt wasn’t necessary.
Why center a big budget movie on a boring actor?
The movie actually does shift from the
ships to other locations around the world, mainly because this is the first
contact with an alien race. Some of this
works, but some of it seems a bit clunky.
The signal from Earth to a planet isn’t really fully explored, and I
felt like there should have been more to this, but the movie is tied down to
this notion of seagoing alien ships attacking Earth ships.
Negative Aspects
-Taylor Kitsch: Yes, the entire movie rests on his shoulders
and he fails critically. Actual wood
would be jealous of his performance.
Taylor is so wooden that he needs to avoid termites. I have no idea why didn’t go with Alexander
Skarsgård instead as the leading role.
-Rihanna: She has one of the worst lines in the
movie. And, she is downright bad as a
petty officer. I am not sure why she has
some many lines considering that she can’t act.
She is a nice looking woman, but stick to singing.
-Aliens are pretty weak: The aliens, in humanoid form, are fairly weak
in design and action. They look like
younger versions of Father Time. I know
they were going for the Predator vibe, it just don’t work in this movie. These aliens are lame.
-The Alien Ships: Uh, they’re basically playing leapfrog on the
water. Leaping looks silly. And, the ships look too much like the sharp
Transformers from Michael Bay’s movie. It
just doesn’t work with the ships jumping around the water.
-Aping Bay too much: Peter Berg does have his own style, such as
the zoom and shake move with scenes, but I felt he used too much of Bay’s style
of frantic camera movements.
-While this is an action movie, the plot
is a little thin mainly because the aliens are so generic.
-Has nothing to do with the board game,
with one little nod to it in dialogue.
-The Nerds are clichéd up to
heaven: The nerds in this movie are
almost up to Jar-Jar standards.
-Alien Big Wheels: Nothing says lame more than a set of alien
big wheels. Who thought these things
were a good idea?
Positive Aspects
-The actual Battleship: Throughout the first two acts, the US and
Japanese navies use destroyer ships. In
the third act, they switch to an old Battleship. This was very impressive given the mixture of
CGI and real ship work. The scenes with
this old ship are impressive.
-Navy Veterans: I loved every scene with the veterans. They end up taking over the old battleship
with the new Japanese and American crew in Hawaii. The montage really does give you sense of all
the hard work they had to do to keep a Battleship in shape. These scenes are the best.
-Multinational Crew: I loved the idea that the movie has a mixture
of various crews from different nations trying to stop this alien invasion.
-Hong Kong Crash Landing: This was very impressive with the alien crash
in HK.
-The subplot with a disabled vet and a
woman fight aliens on the ground works for the most part. But the extremely nerdy guy almost ruins
it.
What we get in Battleship is an uneven
action movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be. It tries to cover all the tropes from the Bay
movie while trying to cover the early 80s alien visitor movies. It all comes across as being a vaguely
entertaining movie. It isn’t as bad as
you think, but it is understandable why North American audiences didn’t watch
the movie.
You sank my battleship. (Sorry)
Grade: C-
Transformers! More than meets the eye!
__________________________________________________________________________
Spinning Alien yo-yos.
2 comments:
Is it me or did it seem like Liam Neeson's admiral should have been played by James Cromwell. Like the voice he uses is so Cromwell.
They are somewhat interchangeable. One's a Star Wars alumni and the other is a Star Trek alumni. They should have used Neeson more than they did.
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