The Dumb-But-Fun Alien Invasion Flop Starring A Pop Icon, That You Don’t Need Netflix To Watch
Edit a lot of idiotic and stolen together into two hours of film, and you end up with a big, silly summer blockbuster in which legless men can be heroes, and the elderly can be useful.
In theory, director Peter Berg’s Battleship is supposed to be based on the popular guessing game of the same name. In reality, there’s almost no connection between Battleship the movie and its Milton Bradley namesake at all, outside of a single thrilling ten-minute sequence involving buoys, missiles, and a big board. The rest of the movie is a puzzle made up of pieces cribbed from some of history’s most infamously ridiculous summer blockbusters.
Sometimes you want big, silly, and stupid on a random Friday night when you’re not going out.
Battleship is an alien invasion movie, I guess, but it’s also one of many Hollywood movies that only really uses aliens because killing them won’t offend anyone. Like any alien species imagined under such creatively corrupted circumstances, these extraterrestrials aren’t very good at their job.
They land in the middle of a naval exercise, which might not be tactically ridiculous if their ships had some sort of technological superiority that would enable them to crush their human opponents without a thought, but they don’t. Their ships can’t even fly.
Edit a lot of idiotic and stolen together into two hours of film, and you end up with a big, silly summer blockbuster in which legless men can be heroes, and the elderly can be useful.
Instead, they sort of flop about in the water and shoot at the Navy with weapons that, while weirder, aren’t all that much more effective than those used on the deck of a World War II-era battleship. Actually, they’re exactly that effective, as the movie later goes on to demonstrate.
Eventually, we find out they’ve arrived as some sort of pre-invasion force, we learn this via an out-of-place scene stolen from every alien invasion movie you’ve ever seen in which an ET mind-melds with one of the crew. So they’re here to wipe out humanity and take the planet for themselves, thus it makes sense when they set about blowing up our ships and attacking the Hawaii mainland. What doesn’t make sense is the alien attackers’ hesitance to shoot at anything that isn’t already shooting at them (later abandoned) or their refusal to kill little kids playing baseball (though they’re happy to murder the ones who use our highway system).
Taylor Kitsch is heroic, Rihanna steals scenes running around shooting guns, and Brooklyn Decker’s moves are so hypnotic it doesn’t matter what sort of dreck comes out of her mouth as dialogue.
So the aliens are ineffectual, ill-equipped, and their tactics don’t make a lot of sense. This leaves the film’s human component to carry the day and, well, they sort of do.
Taylor Kitsch is heroic, Rihanna steals scenes running around shooting guns, and Brooklyn Decker’s moves are so hypnotic it doesn’t matter what sort of dreck comes out of her mouth as dialogue. You won’t even mind that half the script seems like it was written as a PSA for the families of wounded soldiers.
Does it matter if you’re being manipulated if you know you’re being manipulated all along? I say it doesn’t.
Every moment of Battleship is either idiotic or stolen. Edit a lot of idiotic and stolen together into two hours of film, and you end up with a big, silly summer blockbuster in which legless men can be heroes, and the elderly can be useful.
GFR MOVIE SCORE
Sometimes you want big, silly, and stupid on a random Friday night when you’re not going out. It’s unlikely anyone will make anything sillier or stupider than Battleship any time soon. Go ahead and watch it; just don’t tell anyone.
Battleship is now widely available on most streaming platforms, including Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Apple TV+, and Google Play.
