Mini Review - Battleship

Well, this is a thing that exists

Yes, Hollywood really ran out of ideas in 2012, and really hasn’t been recovering that well but someone decided to make a movie based on a board game. Universal to be precise, along with really, Hasbro has a movie division now? Actually, they’ve had one for years and have used it to release Transformers, My Little Pony etc.

But still, a movie based on a board game. Unsurprisingly, it was a disaster with a gargantuan $220m budget, it only made $300m at the box office, resulting in a loss for all parties involved. Critically, it was not a hit either, with a 34% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an average 4.6/10 and an audience score of 54%

Well, here we go.

The story begins with a satellite network being set up to communicate with planets similar to Earth. Wait, what? There are going to be aliens in this movie. Why? Battleship is not a game of humans vs aliens it’s about ships fighting each other. This just seems like a way of emulating Independence Day (which you did a poor job of btw) or just throwing lots of CG at us.

So, then we meet our main character and his character is… he is… I don’t even know. He starts out as a bum but gets some responsibility in the Navy but ends up insulting a guy off-screen and the fight gets him nearly kicked out and berated by his more successful and soon-to-be-dead older brother. Oh, and he’s in love with the Daughter of Liam Neeson’s character, he’s the only actor of note in this entire mess.

 A

Speaking of her, she gets a subplot, which has nothing to do with battleships at all. She’s a physical therapist with a tough patient, who lost his legs in an accident and feels worthless without them. It’s actually some of the more interesting stuff but I just don’t know what it’s doing here. It doesn’t really amplify her relationships, hell, it doesn’t tell us much more about her. It just kinda fills up the time, and when this movie is over 2 hours I don’t know how disappointed I would’ve been if it’d been cut.

So aliens, what diabolical plan do they have in store for earth… Erm, I’m not really sure.  When against the battleships they only target something targeting them, but then they send out some destructive spike balls which destroy anything and everything, apart from small children playing baseball. They’ll destroy cars, roads, random sh*t, product placements that military bases that weren’t active. Their objective is to send a signal using the satellite Network to call in the rest of their ships, they think. Yeah, they really don’t make this objective clear, we only have some people’s guesses to go on.

There are some odd choices with random lens flairs, close ups of animals for no real reason, a rewind shot that’s used once in the entire movie and did I mention there are aliens in this movie. It’s just really dumb.

That said, it’s not entirely awful. I’ve still not been exposed to transformers so I still get a certain degree of happiness with all the explosions and there are no characters I actively hated in the movie, although our lead did have a rough start. Liam Neeson was fun in his brief appearances, and whilst I said the part with Neeson’s daughter could’ve been cut, it never went on too long and the story never felt like it was dragging.

But when it comes to acting talent, this is not the ripest of the crop, is it? Who could forget such astounding performances from *checks IMDb* Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård and… Rihanna?

As an adaptation of Battleship, there’s only about 10-minutes of battleship like combat and even then it doesn’t feel like a game of Battleship, but that may be for the best. You see the skit I put up, that was 4 minutes long when I started it. With regards to the story, it’s not very interesting and the characters are largely quite bland. But there is decent action and the ideas here could’ve been worth exploring in a better movie.

Rating 59/100