Movie Review: Battleship

Plot: When NASA discovers a planet with conditions similar to Earth's, they send a high powered signial to it in hopes of making extraterrestrial contact. Seven years later they do, and an international naval fleet gets caught right in the middle of their response. The crews then must work together to destroy the extraterrestrial ships before they regain contact with their home planet and bring the rest back with them.

My intial response to the development of a movie based off the classic board game Battleship was one gigantic eye roll. But when it was announced Peter Berg was on board to direct, my mind was more open to the idea. Berg has a very strong resume in my opinion; Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom and the very underrated Hancock. But in the end it's still a movie based off a board game.

There are so many problems with this film I don't know where to begin so I'll just start with the beginning. The first thirty minutes of the film is such a giant cliche rip off of Top Gun, it's not even funny. You meet Taylor Kitsch's character, Alex Hopper and his brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård) at a bar celebrating Alex's 25th birthday. It's implied immediately that Alex is always in trouble and going nowhere in life. While at the bar Samantha (Brooklyn Decker) walks in and catches the attention of Alex. The night ends with Alex being chased by police for breaking into a convienent store trying to get Samantha a chicken burito. The whole thing was so over the top and goofy I was ready to quit right then. And of course this causes Samantha to fall for him, because there is nothing more romantic than a guy getting tazed in front of you with a chicken burito in his hand. That silly goofyness is something the film unfortunately never fully gets away from. Much like the first half of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, it was hard to get 100% into a film that kept pulling you out of serious situations with goofy side stories and charachters. There are some good laughs in the film and I'm a believer that all films should have some humor in them, Battleship just fails on how to mix it in.

The next problem is the cast. This film has a very large cast in it, but I was left scratching my head at the end of it. Your main stars are Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Rhianna, Brooklyn Decker, Jesse Plemons, Liam Neeson and a lot of lesser known actors who have larger roles. But what I didn't understand was the random people who just pop up for a line or two and then disappear. Jerry Ferrara (Entourage's Turtle) literally pops in for two lines and then is never heard from again. Rami Malek who has been an up and comer with a wide acting range literally pops up for two or three lines and then is never heard from again. I was left wondering if their roles ended up on the editing floor or if they're just friends with Berg, but it was definitely a waste of good acting talent which this film needed. Liam Neeson was also a disappointment. You pretty much see him at the beginning and end which was another waste of much needed talent.

That leads me to my next problem which was Rhianna. Now after having twenty four hours to sleep on it, she didn't do terrible for her first acting gig, but I felt that her charachter was very forced, especially for someone who didn't have the acting chops to pull it off. To fully get into a film, I need the actors in it to keep me from realizing I'm watching a film. Rhianna's charachter was written poorly but was given a lot to do in the film which ended up in a disaster of a character.

So what's next.....ah the graphics. A movie like this requries a lot of CGI and plain and simple, no movie with a budget like this ($200,000,000), should have bad CGI. And once the aliens show up, I had no problem with the effects. The ships looked great and there is a lot of destruction that is taking place on the planet and it looked just as good as the second half of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. So I had no complaints......until the actual aliens are shown. Once again, I need to be believing what I'm watching and their appearance completely took me out of the film. The aliens in this film looked like cartoon characters. I liked the design of them, but the execution was horrible and it resulted in a cheap looking film.

This movie had potential and it's a shame that it's tanking at the box office because this is one of those "oh what could have been" films. I'm not going to blame Peter Burg as much as I am the writers. I can't tell you how many times I rolled my eyes at the cheesey dialouge or at characters jumping off the back end of a battleship where two huge propellers were still spinning and hot metal and concrete were collapsing everywhere instead of simply jumping off the side where there was no danger, at where a fight with an alien results in the alien's teeth being knocked out in slow motion. And a few times there were blatant continuity errors. It was almost like the writers put their characters in this situation, couldn't figure how to get them out of it, but then just magically gets them out of the danger without any explanation. It was like being trapped in a room with no door, and then just magically making a door appear without any explantaion. With some good writers who were fully aware of what they were doing, this could have made Transformers look like a little school boy.

This continues into the ending of the film. I won't spoil anything, but at the conclusion of the film everyone acts like nothing big just happend. No acts as if friends and family were not just killed and cities weren't just leveled. Instead they all just hang out and cut up. It was a very fast, sloppy transition.

So with all that being said, with six paragraphs worth of bashing this film, I STILL had an absolute blast with it. I bet you didn't see that one coming.... This is the most torn I've been about a film review. It has every reason to get bad ratings, but I had a good time and the audience did too in fact when the audience burst out clapping and fist pumping throughout the film, I felt it to be a bit overboard but they were having a good time and that's all that matters.

What I thought they did a great job at was incorporating the game into the movie. Something I thought was going to come off terrible and would the film turned out to be a fresh new idea that I bought into. With communications down, they had to play hit and miss with their missles. The alien missles resemblence to the pegs used in the game was a nice touch. I appreciated the fact that although the writing was terrible in spots, they did not use cheesey lingo like, "They sunk our battleship", which I would have bet my life on would happen. I liked that they restricted where the ships were. The aliens put up a field allowing no one in or out. This helped keep the action in one place.

Another thing I really loved was how they honored veterans and service members who had been injured in the line of duty. One of the main characters in the film is Greg Gadson. Gadson, a lieutenant colonel with the Second Battalion and 32nd Field Artillery, was returning from a memorial service for two soldiers when his vehicle passed a roadside bomb on May 7, 2007. In the bombing he lost both of his legs. While his acting chops weren't as admirable, you looked right past that due to the mere sacrafice he gave for our country. He does however have the worst fight with an alien I have ever seen. Cheese galore right there. The other thing they did was bring on veterans to help bring the USS Missouri back to life to fight the final ship. Even though this resulted in one of the cheesiest montages I've seen, it was cool to see that on screen and some of them got some great one liners in the film, (I'm glad someone did).

And finally I really dug how it all played out on the ocean. Most movies are land based and I was wondering how well a film based on a board game that is based on the ocean would translate on screen and it was a breath of fresh air. I've seen buildings crumble, I've seen jets fly through the air shooting at each other, I've seen tanks run through villages, but I really liked how they kept this mainly at sea. It was neat seeing battlships and destroyers, seeing how their weapons worked and what their hulls looked like. It was a good take on something new.

So in conclusion, the bad heavily outweighs the good in this film. The actors did their best, the writers did their worst and Berg did the best he could to string it all together. And he must have done a pretty good job because I still had a good time.

Final Verdict: 6/10 BUT.......a good 6/10.