‘Battleship’, yes I saw’ Battleship’. Let’s get this part over.
‘Battleship’ tells the story of two Navy Brothers one a successful captain (Alexander Skarsgård) and one rebel(Taylor Kitsch) who is forced to join by his brother after an chicken burrito stealing incident gets tazerd. However this fateful chicken burrito stealing incident also gains him the affections of the young daughter (Brooklyn Decker) of a Navy Admiral (Liam Neeson). This is quite a chicken burrito! Whenever I eat one all I gain is indigestion. Not a hot girl and an officers commission in the Navy!
This story is interrupted by aliens! That attack for no other reason that I could tell than ‘just cuz’. Wash, rinse, repeat. I could go into the story but who cares. It’s a story that’s been told several times before. Aggression from a foreign invader but our earthly pluckiness is too much for them to bear. And throw in a badass one liner (Mahalo Motherf—explosion!) It’s a dumb turn your brain off action flick. What do you expect?
Apparently people expect more. I haven’t seen a more indignant audience in years! How dare they make a movie based off of a board game? Personally I don’t see this as any more of a stupid of an idea than Transformers, G.I. Joe, Smurfs, or any other of these nostalgia dripping flicks that seem to swell up the summer movie box office.
I didn’t particularly like this movie. It’s not my bag. As much as I enjoy seeing Liam Neeson in anything he’s not enough to save this one.
Overall this movie’s biggest downfall is being based off of ‘Battleship’. Other than one scene is showing the familiar firing grid, and the aliens using ammunition that us ‘Battleship’ veterans will recognize as the white and red pegs used in the game there is very little connecting it to its source material. This feels like a script that was retrofitted to fit a franchise rather than written from the ground up as ‘Battleship’. But to be fair if they were 100% faithful to the game the entire flick would be a static shot of two fleets shooting at each other until there was a victor. And it seems like people would prefer it if that is what we got.
This isn’t a movie that I enjoy. I don’t hate it. I nothing it. However I am different than most in that not only do I not scream ‘why is this piece of crap being made?’ I completely understand why it’s being made. It’s a studio reaction to all of the nostalgia laden flicks I mentioned earlier. Studios see box office success for movies like that and try to repeat the success. So you don’t have to like this movie. Just understand if you’ve bought tickets to any of those movies then you are complicit in movies like ‘Battleship’ I’ve accepted that fact. So if you hate movies like this then all you have to do is not go. It’s really that simple. movie studios react to silence much more than righteous indignation.
