When they announced this movie based on a popular Milton-Bradley game I used to play as a kid last year, I rolled my eyes in that most ‘gimme a break!’ tradition. I mean, how the heck are they going to make a 2-hour movie out of a game based on luck and educated guesses? Then I heard that Michael Bay is the producer and saw the preview and thought: “Ohhh-kay, Transformers on the high seas, think I’ll pass on this one.” You see, I’m not a fan of Michael Bay, whose stupid but hugely successful movies like ‘Armageddon’ and ‘Transformers” totally baffle me. Why do people watch this kind of crap and give him more reasons to make even more stupid movies with big explosions but no brains?
Okay, so I went to see ‘Battleship’ against my better judgment because: (a) Michael Bay didn’t direct it and (b) I kinda like Peter Berg, the actor-turned-director whose other movies like ‘Hancock’ and ‘The Kingdom’were alright. Well, this movie might as well have been directed by Michael Bay, because it’s got his stamp all over it and I simply can’t tell the difference. ‘Battleship’ is every bit as overblown, loud and stupid as every other Michael Bay movie, with the notable exception of the opening scene, in which our protagonist (played by John Carter’s Taylor Kitsch) went to great lengths to obtain a chicken burrito to woo a blond hottie who happened to be the daughter of the admiral played by Liam Neeson.
"Battleship’ is an alien-invasion movie with lots of cool gee-wiz special FX and mind-numbing action. Given the amount of carnage and damage inflicted by the sinister lizard-like aliens in this movie with their superior military technology, it is unfathomable to me how little blood was shed. I suppose it was to maintain the movie’s PG-13 rating, but the movie seemed too much like a ‘game’ (no pun intended) to me. There are a few scenes in the movie that beggars belief, even in the context of an alien invasion movie, such as when a battleship museum was brought out of mothballs in record time so that it can get into point blank range to fire a devastating broadside salvo with its 16-inch guns against an alien ship. In one laughable scene, our hero fired a .50-caliber sniper rifle to open a hole in the ‘window’ of the alien ship because the aliens are sensitive to sunlight (they’re lizards right?).
Just as ‘Battle: Los Angeles’ was essentially a two-hour recruiting commercial for the US Marines, ‘Battleship’ aims to do the same for the US Navy. Boy oh boy I just can’t wait to see what the USAF has in store when its own alien invasion commercial comes out.
5 out of 10
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