Battleship (2012)

**Battleship might have sunk at the box office, but it's still an entertaining disaster to enjoy if you have some time to spare and nothing else to do.** I literally watched this movie in theaters on my honeymoon - not the greatest choice for the first movie as a married couple, but thankfully she stuck with me 😂. Battleship swung for the fences in hopes of being the next Transformers and struck out. I can't say that it was a surprise that a movie based on the board game where you blindly guess where your opponent's boats are on a grid wasn't a mega-hit. There wasn't much there, to begin with, but sprinkling an alien menace on top makes everything better, right? Sadly, it did not. The effects weren't quite there, and some of the acting and characters were outrageously bad. But even with all that being said, Battleship, with the right expectations, is still an entertaining movie! Taylor Kitsch is a fun actor. Rihanna makes a feature film debut. Liam Neeson pops up. Aliens are blown up. Shut your brain off and embrace the nonsensical goofy action.

I have to say that I enjoyed this movie. The visual effects are great, the alien designs are interesting and there’s lots of explosive hardware flying around. Although not exactly a very logical/practical design I did like the cool rolling “balls” of destruction that the aliens where using. Seeing the “Mighty Mo” in action was of course an additional plus. It’s really a shame that these magnificent floating fortresses have become obsolete. However, the enjoyment brought by this movie was almost purely one of visual effects. Well, I generally like Liam Neeson as well but not much else in this movie was of any higher standards. The story is the usual Hollywood stuff. The holes in the logic are big enough to drive, well, a battleship through. For instance, the aliens can come from far away, navigate between the stars, but they cannot avoid accidentally colliding with a satellite in earth orbit? Come on. It unfortunately becomes even worse when they decide to fire up the Missouri. I could live with the fact that there’s no way that a handful of veterans could have gotten that ship into running state. I could even live with the fact that the film ignores that it would take days to fire the ship up from cold storage even under optimal circumstances and with a full crew. But what really got me pissed off is when they drop the anchor to make a “hand break turn” and turn the ship around on a dime actually sliding the ship on the water. What the fuck !!! How utterly ignorant, dumb, stupid can you become as a Hollywood producer/scriptwriter/director? I’m actually being kind to these morons now because if the people that wrote that scene is not total idiots then they are assuming that the audience are such idiots which would be even worse. That part alone dropped it two stars for me. I still gave it 6 out of 10 because I enjoyed the visual effects and the sea battles so much.

It rhymes with ship! Actually that's a little unfair, for those after a two hour plus movie of noise and robotic like destruction, then this has a modicum of popcorn frivolity about it. But it's all so vacuous, any semblance of a story is given over for a chance to show some Transformers effects work, the human characters constantly an afterthought as they play second fiddle to another CGI action scene. It feels like an extended toy advertisement, the acting is sub-standard and the editing - appropriately enough for the film's setting - is akin to a bout of sea sickness. The action sequences all carry a familiarity about them, while like their human counterparts, the alien foe here are devoid of any rhyme or reason as to their motive and being. Cash infused metallic porn at its most tiresome. 5/10