Battleship is
loosely based on the board game Battlships and stars Taylor Kitsch as an
unlikely hero in a battle between the US Navy and alien invaders. We see Kitsch
at the beginning of the film in a bar being told he has to think about his future.
He is 26 and without a job, living on the sofa of his Naval Officer brother’s
house. He is reckless and seemingly lacks direction. Then suddenly he is a Lieutenant
in the US Navy and in charge of the weapons or something on the USS John Paul Jones (which isn’t named
after the Led Zeppelin bassist unfortunately). While out on manoeuvres with an
international fleet off the coast of Hawaii,
Kitsch (and Rihanna…sigh…) are sent to investigate a crashed UFO somewhere in
the Ocean. It transpires that five alien ships have been dispatched to Earth
after a transmission to their home planet. After travelling though millions of
miles of space, one ship inexplicably hits a satellite in Earth’s orbit, while
the other four plunge into the Pacific Ocean.
Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson) orders a warning shot which starts a battle. A
battle with ships.
I was sceptical going in about how a film could be made
based on a game I used to play with my dad using two pens and a maths exercise
book. For about five minutes, two thirds in, the film succeeds in making a film
like the game. This sequence is also exciting and interesting. For the rest of
the film, bar the odd overhead shot of ships in formation, it might as well
have been any old Naval action movie.
There is so much wrong with this movie that I could go on
for pages but I’ll try and keep it brief. Firstly, the dialogue is atrocious. It’s
like it was written by a teenager who has seen two action movies. It is so
cheesy that it is actually funny. Secondly, the acting is really bad. Good
actors such as Neeson and Alexander Skarsgard have no more than fifteen minutes
of screen time between them and instead we are left with Rihanna who mainly
sits by a computer and says “Yes Sir!” I’m pleased that she didn’t take the
Britney Spears
Crossroads route into
acting but she hardly sets the world alight and her casting is an obvious
attempt to draw in people who wouldn’t see the movie without her in it.
Brooklyn Decker spends most of the film standing on a mountain with a legless
man, looking confused but pretty. This is apart from one scene in which she is
somehow channels Colin McRae and becomes a rally driver. She is nothing more
than eye candy here. After the critical and commercial failure of
John Carter, Taylor Kitsch again fails
to impress and lacks the charisma to carry the film. I personally think that
Skarsgard would have been a better choice for the role. He completely
outclasses Kitsch in their scenes together and has bags of charisma.
The whole film is played far too straight. It
is always so serious. Blockbusters used to be fun and this definitely isn’t.
Much of the film is stupid and makes no sense. After an
alien craft destroys a 7,000 tonne Cruiser, a mile away, it then fails to blow
up a rubber dinghy carrying Kitsch and Rihanna which is ten feet from its hull.
Also, after a ship has been destroyed with tremendous loss of life, someone
asks Kitsch if everyone is ok to which he replies “Yes!” What he meant to say
is “Well I’m fine, Rihanna’s fine and the Japanese guys alright too”. The
entire plot is as full of holes as the destroyed Cruiser while the obvious
product placement will have you stopping by Subway on your way home to pick up
a Coke Zero. One thing that really annoyed me was the constant
robotic/electronic noises which permeate the whole film. They are present in
most sci-fi action films but just sound ridiculous. The film’s ending is
ridiculous too.
The next paragraph contains spoilers.
After aliens have destroyed all of the modern ships, Kitsch
et al find the 70 year old museum ship the USS
Missouri and along with about five shells and a crew of pensioners manage
to defeat the aliens when 21st Century technology has failed! Its
admirable that the film makers used real WWII Veterans but their inclusion helps
to pile on the cheesiness.
Spoilers over.
On the plus side, some of the GCI is good. The design of the
alien ships and particularly the aliens themselves were excellent. A lot of
though had gone into what they looked like and why and they were very
believable. Another aspect I liked was that the aliens are never the aggressors.
This also felt realistic and believable. If we went to a new world, we wouldn’t
go in all guns blazing
Independence Day style
but would identify targets and differentiate between friend and foe. At the
beginning of the film I thought that maybe this would be a rare Blockbuster in
which the
USA
doesn’t go it alone but apart from a token Japanese guy, the excellent Tadanobu
Asano (
Zatoichi) this turned out to
be the case.
The message the film delivers is commendable but is
unfortunately lost in the explosions. The film is trying to tell us that
sometimes the old ways are better and that we shouldn’t rely too heavily on
technology but the way it tells you is ridiculous and laughable. On the whole
the film is a massive disappointment. It is too long, it takes itself far too
seriously, is no fun and features terrible acting and dialogue. The
relationships feel false and while you’d expect a side of cheese, here it is
served as the main course. If you want to watch Transformers on water then this is for you but if you want
something more you need look elsewhere.
3/10
