Review of Battleship (2012) by Stephen C — 20 Apr 2014

If you think you would enjoy over 2 hours of nothing but explosions, CGI, bad acting, and a minimal plot - then here is the movie for you! I went into this with low expectations and it still managed to disappoint me. This movie is so over the top that I could not stop laughing at scenes that weren't meant to be funny.

It starts out with Taylor Kitsch's character (Alex) meeting a girl (Sam) at a bar who was hungry for a burrito. So he breaks into a convenience store to get this girl a frozen burrito and manages to get it to her as he is being tasered and arrested. Cut to sometime in the future - Alex & Sam are in love and Alex is now in the navy (along with his brother and Sam's father). They show some scientists that send out a signal to a planet that is similar to ours. Aliens invade, they destroy a bunch of shit, and the Navy fights them. That's basically the entire plot of this movie.

There's so much CGI in this film, which is expected - but it's overused so much that it hurts the film. I cannot tell you how many shots there are where it shows the alien ships arming their missiles. There will be a shot of missiles arming, then they cut away to something else, and then cut to another set of missiles being armed. It's overused so much that after a certain point, you think "Enough already! We get it! They have a ton of missiles! We don't need to see all 500 missiles being armed in close-up shots!".

There are a bunch of moments that are supposed to make a character look bad ass, but they are so cheesy that I laughed at them. For instance, Rihanna's character has a bunch of moments where she has to say something cool before killing an alien. It's similar to what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in many of his action films. However, when Arnold does it, I feel like it's meant to get a chuckle out of the audience. When Rihanna does it, it seemed like they are trying to be serious. As a matter of fact, she won the "Razzie" for Worst Supporting Actress at their 2012 awards show.

The acting is pretty bad across the board on this one too. I felt like Liam Neeson was one of the only ones that actually seemed like they were hired for their acting ability. But even with his particular set of skills, he couldn't rescue this movie. Most of the cast was probably hired because they are good looking.

Even if there were a cast of Oscar-winning actors, I still don't think they had enough to work with story-wise to make this anything more than mediocre (at best). I don't think board games have enough story to make a serious film. Clue worked well because it was a comedy. Had Battleship been made into a comedy, perhaps it would have worked better.

The one good thing I can say about this film is that at least it's so bad that it's funny and not just bad. So if you want to laugh at an unintentionally funny movie - or if you just feel like turning your brain off and watching a ton of explosions - give it a try.