Okay, so the box office numbers haven't generally been that
explosive, shall we say. That's more due to The Avengers totally dominating theaters, though. This movie, based very loosely on the Hasbro game of the same name, is actually a really enjoyable film; once the alien invasion starts, that is.
Battleship is actually one of the best alien invasion movies I've seen; and you know how critical I can be of alien invasion movies. It exploits a weakness, of course, but not an unreasonable one like a sensitivity to water (which is good, because most of the action takes place in the Pacific Ocean). It requires a diverse group of humans to band together, which is arranged by staging an international war games exercise on the day the invasion begins (bit of a coincidence, but the sailors from different countries do make a great team). And it has Liam Neeson; not very much of him, but hey, it's Liam Neeson.
On the other hand, it also has Taylor Kitsch (John Carter). Kitsch's character is Lieutenant Hopper, whose attitude problem has grown so large that he's facing a discharge from the Navy once the war games have ended. His older brother, played by Alexander Skarsgård (True Blood), is commander of one of the other ships. He's been looking out for him all his life, but can't make him grow up. And one of the Japanese captains, played by Tadanobu Asano (Thor) goes from fistfighting Hopper to fighting alongside him. Oh, and supersinger Rihanna is also in the film.
The characters are all pretty cookie-cutter, but like I said, once the invasion starts, it gets really good. They don't bother trying to impress people by spending a lot of time on the aliens' biology or weapons technology, focusing instead on strategy. They don't give the aliens a massive advantage (not too much of one, anyway), showing from the beginning that even aliens can have a crash landing. The communications ship is disabled, which means they have to take over human communications satellites to reach the rest of their species. So, the humans have a simple, if not particularly easy, task: knock out their own satellites as well as the remaining alien ships.
The aliens still have the advantage, though. Their weapons are still superior to ours (some of their artillery actually resembles the pegs from the old Hasbro game), and they quickly demolish any warships that engage them. Hopper and company, though, manage to limp their way to Hawai'i, where the last battleship in the Navy awaits them. The "Mighty Mo", the USS Missouri, where Japan surrendered as the final act of World War II, which fought in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, which has been essentially a floating museum for decades, finds itself brought out of retirement for one last fight. It sounds cheesy, maybe even a little jingoistic, but you rarely see an alien invasion movie that doesn't have some ultra-patriotic scene. In Battle: Los Angeles, it's the U.S. Marines going straight into battle. Independence Day, of course, has the big battle on the Fourth of July. Battleship, however, doesn't feel cheesy at all when you see veterans returning to their posts and the Mighty Mo taking to the sea. Perhaps foreign audiences won't feel the same swell of pride that Americans do, but purely as an action sequence, watching it sail into battle is still thrilling.
Do the aliens sink their battleship? You don't expect me to give away the ending, do you? Go see the film. The "human interest" parts may not be Shakespeare, exactly, but the "human versus alien" parts will blow you out of the water.
(original review posted at http://fourthdayuniverse.com/reports/2012/05/battleship-unsinkable/ )
Battleship is actually one of the best alien invasion movies I've seen; and you know how critical I can be of alien invasion movies. It exploits a weakness, of course, but not an unreasonable one like a sensitivity to water (which is good, because most of the action takes place in the Pacific Ocean). It requires a diverse group of humans to band together, which is arranged by staging an international war games exercise on the day the invasion begins (bit of a coincidence, but the sailors from different countries do make a great team). And it has Liam Neeson; not very much of him, but hey, it's Liam Neeson.
On the other hand, it also has Taylor Kitsch (John Carter). Kitsch's character is Lieutenant Hopper, whose attitude problem has grown so large that he's facing a discharge from the Navy once the war games have ended. His older brother, played by Alexander Skarsgård (True Blood), is commander of one of the other ships. He's been looking out for him all his life, but can't make him grow up. And one of the Japanese captains, played by Tadanobu Asano (Thor) goes from fistfighting Hopper to fighting alongside him. Oh, and supersinger Rihanna is also in the film.
The characters are all pretty cookie-cutter, but like I said, once the invasion starts, it gets really good. They don't bother trying to impress people by spending a lot of time on the aliens' biology or weapons technology, focusing instead on strategy. They don't give the aliens a massive advantage (not too much of one, anyway), showing from the beginning that even aliens can have a crash landing. The communications ship is disabled, which means they have to take over human communications satellites to reach the rest of their species. So, the humans have a simple, if not particularly easy, task: knock out their own satellites as well as the remaining alien ships.
The aliens still have the advantage, though. Their weapons are still superior to ours (some of their artillery actually resembles the pegs from the old Hasbro game), and they quickly demolish any warships that engage them. Hopper and company, though, manage to limp their way to Hawai'i, where the last battleship in the Navy awaits them. The "Mighty Mo", the USS Missouri, where Japan surrendered as the final act of World War II, which fought in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, which has been essentially a floating museum for decades, finds itself brought out of retirement for one last fight. It sounds cheesy, maybe even a little jingoistic, but you rarely see an alien invasion movie that doesn't have some ultra-patriotic scene. In Battle: Los Angeles, it's the U.S. Marines going straight into battle. Independence Day, of course, has the big battle on the Fourth of July. Battleship, however, doesn't feel cheesy at all when you see veterans returning to their posts and the Mighty Mo taking to the sea. Perhaps foreign audiences won't feel the same swell of pride that Americans do, but purely as an action sequence, watching it sail into battle is still thrilling.
Do the aliens sink their battleship? You don't expect me to give away the ending, do you? Go see the film. The "human interest" parts may not be Shakespeare, exactly, but the "human versus alien" parts will blow you out of the water.
(original review posted at http://fourthdayuniverse.com/reports/2012/05/battleship-unsinkable/ )