Battleship (2012)

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.