An Argument on Why BATTLESHIP is Actually Awesome!!!!!

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.

Fan-made poster

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.

Not a BATTLESHIP Alien

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.

The Lucky One (C-)

This movie has the feeling of a book heavily edited. Nothing really fits into place. Certain scenes have potential, but the film seems to have abandoned their emotional impact in favor of its hackneyed, morally problematic, intensely boring formula.

The opening scenes becomes important later in the film so it would help if the audience understood exactly what is going on. We don’t. The part that I can infer is that a Marine named Logan discovers a picture of a lady in the rubble of some Iraqi battleground, and that picture gives him good luck. Hence the title. Anyway, Logan returns to the US and tries to track down the lady who gave it to him. He tries to thank her for what she did, but ends up not saying anything. The lady’s grandmother, who doesn’t look nearly old enough to be her grandmother, gives him a job working on their dog training and housing facility. The lady--named Beth--doesn’t like him being there, but she has lost a brother in the war and gone through a messy divorce and has a depressed kid so she has a free pass to be a witch for the first third of the movie. Logan is to timid and traumatized from the war to explain why he came, though apparently not to timid to bed her. Complicating matters is Beth’s ex, who is going to do anything to get Beth back.

The movie has some moral problems. First off, Logan is a pretty big jerk for getting intimate with a lady he refuses to tell basic facts related to her life. But maybe we aren’t supposed to support his actions. I believe in the book, his duplicity is a bigger deal. Here it is not: It is only another obstacle standing between two lovers destined to be together. Romantic? Could be, but everything seems a little uninspired. I don’t see a connection between the two protagonists.

A bigger issue is the nonchalant attitude towards alcohol abuse, an especially big problem seeing as the target audience hasn’t hit puberty yet. But I don’t think it is just a moral flaw unrelated to the story--I think the film has characters so wooden, bland, and inexpressive they need to be under the influence of some kind of drug for us to find their romance half-way plausible. Maybe if they used meth the movie might be half-way entertaining.

The film’s problems aren’t the actors fault, though they certainly don’t help matters. Zac Efron (Logan) is trying awfully hard to not be the kid from High School Musical, which means he is paralyzed and emotionless. I guess it fits the character--it would be nice if there was some sign of life, though. Taylor Schilling (Beth) is acceptable, but isn’t able to make her bland character relatable. Blythe Danner (the grandmother) is charming for the first couple minutes, but not in the “wow, I would actually like this person” but in the “if only my parents were like that.” Which is fitting for a movie so distanced from reality and real expressiveness that it seems more like a twelve-year-old girl’s fantasy than a story of true love.

A huge part of the story deals with Keith (Jay R. Ferguson), Beth’s depressed ex. You get the feeling his story arc was of crucial importance to the book (Nicholas Sparks, by the way), but it seems more like a not fully coherent interruption in the movie. Even the final (improbable) river disaster scene ends up more of a plot tie-up than a critical epiphany.

The Lucky One is boring and morally flawed due to an uninspired take on what might be a good book. And I won’t finish this review off with a pun involving the world “luck” because I am too annoyed mine ran out and I ended up having to sit through this.

The Raid: Redemption (A-)

Iko Uwais as Rama

While its audience is admittedly small, The Raid is sure to please hard-core action fans with its amazingly choreographed and edited fight scenes.

Rama (Iko Uwais in what is hopefully a star-making role) is a new member of a highly-trained special ops force in Indonesia that is called to raid a twelve story apartment that is believed to be manufacturing and distributing large quantities of drugs and weapons. The apartment is twelve stories high and is heavily guarded by battle hardened gangsters. After things turn violent, Rama discovers that the team was sent their by corrupt officials for an execution--in other words, there will be no back-up. Making matters more complicated is that the gangster on the top floor (Ray Sahetapy) ordering all the killing is guarded by an extremely dangerous adrenaline addict (Yayan Ruhian) and Rama’s own brother (Donny Alamsya).

Those who would be turned off by subtitles shouldn’t fear--there is very little dialogue in this movie. The film is all about the action. In fact, it is nearly two hours of practically non-stop action. A complete bloodbath. People are stabbed, slashed, shot, dismembered, pummeled, strangled, defenestrated, impaled, scalded, exploded, beheaded, bludgeoned, suffocated, crushed, mutilated, and killed for effectively the entire running time. You would think it would be boring--to most it probably would be--but the impressive quality of editing and stunts is so impressive that I found the entire story involving.

Gareth Evans (Merantu) directs and edits with an incredible grasp of how to make practically indistinguishable scenes seem uniquely entertaining. Shakycam and slow-motion are both used---often at the same time--but it never becomes distracting. The combatants are ridiculously skilled and near-immortal (often to laughable extremes), but the violence maintains its intensity. Interwoven into the fight scenes are surprisingly suspenseful moments where the heroes cower in every nook and cranny to avoid the searching killers. There are often multiple fights going on at the same time in different locations, and yet they are edited so well that you never lose track of what is going on and care about the outcome of everything.

Action-lovers rejoice. This is one thrill-ride you don’t want to miss.

Overrated/Underpraised: Fast Five v. Death Race

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Nathan Adams of Filmschoolrejects has started a cool new column which pits a film with undeserved love against an unfortunately ignored or ridiculed one. I'm making a similar blog, and by similar I mean the exact same. :)

Few genres are more entertaining than carsploitation—huge, violent, absurd spectacles with automobile v. automobile showdowns. The highest grossing one of them all is the well-reviewed and highly adored Fast Five. Sadly, it is not a good representation of the genre. I nominate Death Raceto take its place.

There are a lot of problems with the big-budget sequel Fast Five. For starters—and this is the biggy—it seems way to much like an affirmation for organized crimes. The movie opens with the two heroes of the story making a living now that they are outlaws. What exactly made them outlaws? Driving cars through crowded city streets in top-speed races for an underground gambling corporation. No, they weren’t framed. No, they didn’t do it to protect the ones they love. They just did it for the money, risking the lives of those around them while funding huge organized crime rings such as the Yakuza and Mexican drug cartels (that isn’t hypothesis by the way: It is in the previous films).

Now it ruins a blockbuster to obsess on logic. But that doesn’t mean we must totally twist around our way of thinking to excuse something that is completely against every morals our society has. How exactly can viewers justify the actions of these heroes?

In Fast Five opener, these outlaws—led by Vin Diesel and Paul Walker—are hiding in Rio, Brazil where they make a deal to steal cars claimed by the CIA because they were being used to smuggle drugs (why exactly the CIA has a bunch of smugglers cars in the middle of Rio is not answered). It’s not really wrong, since these aren’t individuals’ cars—unless you remember that they would be sold to pay for government programs such as social security or building new schools. Well, at least it’s victimless. Well it starts out that way. The outlaws make a deal to steal the car with a vicious Brazilian gang (they say they will split the profits, though it implied they plan to steal it all). This goes about as well as one would expect—Vin Diesel’s girlfriend drives off with the first of the stolen cars, and the gangsters catch on. They start firing guns and kill a US fed and then put a price on the head of our so-called heroes.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is then brought in to track them down, and he doesn’t listen to the outlaws when they explain it isn’t there fault since they didn’t plan on shooting anyone. Apparently sneaking a bunch of convicted felons onto government propery, stealing a ton of government cars, and then inciting a duel by double crossing one’s partners is in no way a situation one could reasonably expect could end up with someone getting killed.

The movie continues like that with the outlaws starting a heist that destroys several miles of urban storefronts and presumably kills dozens of innocent bystanders. The problem with this is two-fold: First, it is pretty hard to root for the protagonists if one thinks about the story; Second, it is a pretty blatant glorification of South and Central American organized crime. Every year, cops trained and armed by the US in Mexico and Columbia bravely die fighting to rid their country of the drug cartels which steal, torture, and terrorize entire regions of the world (and poison the US with a steady supply of ballistics and cocaine). There are fun popcorn flicks that you don’t think about that hard and then there are movies where you must terminate your capacity to think.

A few years before Fast Five there was Death Race. It flopped at the box office, though a movie like this is most likely to make its cash on DVD and cable television anyway. Critically, it fared better—half the critics really liked it, half couldn’t stand it (there was no middle ground). Still, no amount of fact-bending can say it’s $75 million global total and 43 Metacritic score can stand up to Fast Five’s might. This is a pity. Death Race proves big, stupid carsplotiation flicks can be clever and fun.

Death Race takes place in a not-so-distant dystopian future where an economic crash caused the American prison system to be privatized and the prisoners are offered freedom if they compete in hugely popular televised gladiatorial combat. You would think there would be very few volunteers, but that is because you didn’t know that in this future prison sentences are insanely long and prisons are insanely dangerous (because apparently having more prisoners is more profitable). These gladiatorial combats have grown increasingly elaborate, but the most popular of all is the Death Race. This is done with bulky armored trucks loaded with multiple armories of vicious tools of destruction that make Ben-Hurr’s chariots seem like Barbie dream cars. The goal is to cross the finish line first—in the third round. The only way to be eliminated in the first and second rounds is tonever cross the finish line, so those two are more like demolition derbies. It’s like the Hunger Games, but you don’t have to feel guilty when someone dies because they are all criminal adults!

Fast Five had a car scene where the car has stilts, and there was the scene with the vault attached to a car, but for the most part that movie just has ordinary cars. Death Race has super-hero cars. There are only so many ways you can kill someone with a regular car, but if you attach rocket launchers, spikes, chains, plows, heat-seeking missiles, elector seats, and detachable walls your car chases will never grow old. So just on sheer coolness level, Death Race is a few thousand levels above Fast Five.

Also, there is very little objectionable about Death Race. The protagonist has been framed and is racing so he can be reunited with his infant daughter. Nothing bad about that motive. And while the violence is bloody, it is in such a ridiculous manner that it really shouldn’t be considered more graphic than Fast Five’s.

Director Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat and most of the Resident Evil films) goes overboard with the dark coloring in the cinematography, but he finds the perfect match of shakycam, slow-mo, and good old fashioned regular-speed steadycam (is “steadycam” a word?); he also makes sure to keep things intense while maintaining a light and silly atmosphere (which, for better or for worse, dumbs down the heavy-handed political commentary of Death Race 2000, which Death Race is a remake of). The characters are far more interesting than in Fast Five—the hero teams up with a crew of misfits including an autistic savant (Fred Koehler) and a guy who doesn’t flinch when cars fire weapons at him but is too nervous to reenter the real world even though he has long since served his time (played perfectly by Ian McShane). Natalie Martinez has fun as the protagonist’s love interest, Tyrese Gibson and Max Ryan make for intimidating rival drivers, and three-time Oscar nominee Joan Allen plays the icy cold business-minded prison chairman who is the real villain. Jason Statham is an icon of B-movies, but he has A-list skills: As Death Race’s leading man he is far more interesting than anyone in Fast Five.

Forget Fast Five. Rent Death Race today!