Generally, my reviews are spoiler-free affairs. However, the unfortunate reaction to Battleship compels me to resort to a spoileriffic analysis of all the reasons this movie is secretly awesome.
There is one big flaw with this movie that must be gotten out of the way first: The aliens have terrible, terrible strategic planning. Yes, it is true that colonization generally turns out poorly for the less technologically advanced race (a la Columbus & the Indians). However, the aliens’ basic approach towards colonization is terrible. Sending out a small fleet of explorers to see whether Earth is worth colonizing? Good idea. Having that small fleet needlessly pick a fight with Earthlings before it radios back for help? Bad idea. This is the equivalent of Columbus landing the Santa Maria, finding the first tribe of natives, shooting a bunch of the weaker members of the tribe, and then camping out in America a few days before returning to Spain to get reinforcements. The aliens would be much smarter to wow the humans with their spectacular entry, give them a few gadgets, wait for reinforcements, start colonizing, wait until humanity gets annoyed at their destructiveness, arm a few terrorist groups with futuristic weapons so as to keep the world busy fighting itself for a while, wait until humanity finally tries to attack the now developed alien fortresses, and then start sending out the helicopter killing droids (or, more effectively, send one of the ships around Earth at light-speed for a bit). Like the Europeans did (sort of).
Then again, a few implausibilities can be excused. Perhaps the evolution of the aliens (while presumably started by the same genes as humans, due to their striking resemblance to us) has built brains that think differently from us, lacking the ability to foresee events more than twelve hours into the future, or to design spaceships that can use their fantastic speeds in combat. Or maybe the aliens are in fact a quite primitive species that merely bought/stole the weapons and spaceships from another alien race (one that knew how to use them). Anyway, if people can accept that the toys in Toy Story don’t talk around humans except for Sid or that Joker can really escape from the police station by triggering a cell phone bomb in his henchman’s stomach or pretty much anything that happens in a Transformers movie, then people can handle these somewhat dim-witted antagonists.
Let’s get started on the secret reasons Battleship is awesome.
1. There is absolutely no reason anyone should have a problem with a movie based on a board game. Before it even released a single production still, Battleship was under attack due to the fact it is based on a board game. It seemed the epitome of Hollywood unoriginality. The arguments (generally given by the same people) boiled down to two stupid excuses that contradict each other. The first is that the board game Battleship is not suitable grounds for a movie. This is dumb because it should be assumed that the screenwriters would add more to the story. Isn’t it okay for artistic inspiration to come from anything? And what is the problem with letting Hasbro spend millions marketing your movie just for you to name it after one of their games?
The other complaint was that the movie was nothing like the game. “Aliens? Robots? Rhianna? That isso unfaithful!” This would be a legitimate complaint if it was a book adaptation, short story adaptation, TV show adaptation, video game adaptation, song adaptation, fable adaptation, or any other kind of adaptation of something with a semblance of a plot. That is because the original creators of those stories wanted to actually tell something and the fans wanted to see it brought to the screen. It is hurtful to see no one take any care to please the people who made something popular in the first place. This is not a valid argument for a board game (especially one as simplistic as Battleship) since there is no story to mess up and no one is seriously hurt that the movie isn’t a two hour reconstruction of little red dots and white dots hitting little plastic ships while people sit thoughtfully guessing what square might have a little plastic ship.
It really doesn’t matter that it is based on a board game.
2. The protagonists are genuinely interesting. Obviously, a movie like this isn’t going to have much depth. Duh. But this movie does a better job than, say, Transformers of making characters we actually care about. For example, the opening scene features the protagonist, Alex (Taylor “Box Office Poison” Kitsch), being a level one imbecile. He drunkenly breaks into a convenience store, nearly kills himself trying to crawl out a skylight, causes a three car pile-up by running across a highway, and gets himself tased all to give a girl he knows nothing about a chicken burrito. This is a perfect way to negate the fact that for the next two hours he will be a composed, highly skilled, genius assassin who is not going to be familiar to your average audience member (like myself). When we see Alex coming up with a stunning plan to misdirect the enemy, we can still care whether or not he succeeds because we remember seeing him as an ordinary klutz doing stupid things. (It is quite possible this is only a selling point for me).
3. There is a real exposition. How long into Battle: Los Angeles did the aliens show up? The time it took you to think of the answer was longer than the answer itself. This is a key problem to many action films: we barely know the characters or their relationships before the fighting starts, and thus we have no investment in what happens (in the case of Transformers 3, that is a good thing, since we already hate Shia and the rest of the protagonists so much knowing any more about them will cause us to root for the Decepticons). In Battleship, there are a good twenty-five minutes before the aliens show up, and in that time we see several interesting characters and real conflicts that go beyond Earth bazooka vs Planet-G bazooka. We see Alex and Yugi bicker incessantly, Alex constantly rely on his big brother, Liam Neeson (who cares what his character is called?) humorously express exactly why he loathes Alex, and Captain Browley struggle to adjust to life without legs. Then we see the aliens.
4. The aliens actually look cool. Modern movie aliens tend to all be arachnid/crustacean hybrids. The prawns in District 9, the slimy crab things in Battle: LA, the Cloverfield monster, the light-up jellyfish inSkyline, the miniature Cloverfield monster in Super 8, the spider worms in War of the Worlds… They all look like something that would be really satisfying to step on. I don’t know about you, but I really want to see a vertebrate attack Earth for a change. All these creepy-crawly aliens look the same. Even the alien spaceships in Avengers look like giant lobsters.
The Battleship aliens look like people mixed with lizards, two of which are animals people actually enjoy looking at. Furthermore, they wear space-suits, so they don’t get themselves killed by touching water or breathing oxygen (you know what movies I’m talking about). Yes, their suits look like Halo clothes minus repulsor blasters: But aren’t Halo suits really awesome?
5. The references to the game Battleship. The scenes where the characters must play a real-life version of the game and even let out phrases like “it’s a hit!” or “no, I missed!” are funny, but best of all they fit into the plot and have a lot of build-up. They are funny in-jokes that were obviously part of the screenplay, not tacked on in last minute rewrites in the vein of “I’m the Juggernaut, b****!” (see X-Men 3 to understand what that is about).
6. The government isn’t behind the attack. This shouldn’t be that impressive, but in most of these movies the US government is directly planning the chaos, even when it makes absolutely no sense. The closest in Battleship is that NASA sent out an interstellar telegram saying “hello” that happened to land on a planet full of sociopaths.
It isn’t just that. Unlike most other movies (yes, Transformers must be brought up again) there is nothing in Battleship that is very offensive or destructive. No positive alcohol abuse moments; no gratuitous sex scenes; no buck-toothed angry black men….
7. Battleship is patriotic. On a related note to the previous point, Battleship is both an awesome tribute to the servicemen and a satisfying tales of all different types of Americans united together for the common good.
8. All the plot threads are resolved and in a satisfying manner. There are a lot of different story arcs going on in Battleship: Alex learning humility and reason; Alex and Yugi learning to respect each other; Alex manning up and not constantly disappointing his fiancé; Captain Bowley finding meaning to a life without legs; Hal growing a pair and fighting for the good of Earth… They are all resolved, but not one-by-one, but all at once. Earth is saved by the simultaneous efforts of the battleship, Bowley and his crew, and Liam Neeson’s fighter jets. And it isn’t forced—we know that Hal is going to man up, but the film waits until we have forgotten about him before he shows up to save Bowley, and he uses the suitcase he was bragging about earlier.
These are by no means the only benefits of Battleship. It is fun to see the older heroes teaching the younger ones; the jokes are actually witty; the acting is above average… But I hope what I have said hear is enough for you to rethink what you’ve heard and maybe realize Battleship is awesome.
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