Battleship (Movie) Review

A movie, like a warship, is made up of parts. When those parts are combined effectively you get something like an Arleigh Burke Destroyer, a fast, reliable and versatile combatant that has become the backbone of the Unites States fleet.

When those parts are not combined effectively you get something like a battleship. An unwieldy, expensive and decrepit effort that can’t get the job done. Or the movie Battleship (2012), an unholy marketing alliance between the United States Navy and Hasbro. It also marks the last gasp of the 1990s-style Michael Bay action flick before Marvel Comics took over the box office for the next decade.

Let’s start with the plot. After receiving a friendly invitation to come visit a new planet, a heroic band of space explorers crash lands on a dangerous planet. During the disaster their radio, and ability to send and receive messages is destroyed. While getting their bearings they are attacked by hostile natives who do not respond to nonviolent warnings. Using strict rules of engagement and the principle of least necessary force they try to cobble together a means of sending an SOS back home while doing their best to keep the increasingly aggressive natives unharmed and away from their base of operations.

That’s the interpretation that Enigmatic of RPG.net put forth 25 years ago when the film was released and it’s pretty solid. The subsequent careers of director Peter Berg and writers Erich and Jon Hoeber suggest the film was probably never intended as a subversive masterpiece but somebody must have been tweaking the studio’s nose. Atypical for most alien invasion movies the scenes shot from their perspective show restraint and a clear motivation that goes beyond genocide. In case the audience misses this? Everything seen by the invaders is given red or green overlay depending on whether it’s considered a legitimate target.

There’s thousands of deaths of course, but all of them are excusable as regrettable misunderstandings, collateral damage or the tragic accidents of modern war. One could question why the aliens felt the need to bring so many of their peg-based weapons on a mission of peace, but in light of subsequent events it was probably best that they came prepared.

From the human perspective, alien invaders land in the ocean off of Hawaii and raise a force-field with the bulk of the Pacific fleet, plus Liam Neeson (who was probably on set for two days) trapped outside. A plucky band of Navy misfits plus $6 billion dollars of General Dynamics hardware is all that stands between us and our ultimate doom.

Fortunately we have an excellent actor, one who previously excelled in a story of leadership during wartime hampered by shifting goals, political constraints and ever-present uncertainty. I am speaking of course of the brilliant Alexander Skarsgård who played Sgt. Brad “Iceman” Colbert in HBO’s Generation Kill and most recently made Apple TV’s Murderbot a must see.

He plays Commander Stone Hopper and naturally he dies twenty minutes in. That way we can shift the focus to his idiot younger brother Alex Hopper, played by Taylor Kitsch.

Look, I’m not going to bash Kitsch too much, after all 2012 was a rough year for him. He headlined three, big-budget summer movies (Battleship, John Carter and Oliver Stone’s Savages) all of which bombed. The script isn’t doing him any favors but he’s just also not rising above the material. He may have nailed troubled, teenaged football player on Friday Night Lights, but he doesn’t have leading man chops.

Skarsgård does, but he dies after making some poor decisions during first contact with an alien species. The aliens, desperately pulling their punches, still wind up blowing up two out of three destroyers leaving Kitsch in charge of our last surviving hope. That naturally involves a lot of yelling and running around with guns and very little deliberation with senior staff or consultations with headquarters at Pearl Harbor.

Assisting Kitsch in making a nuisance of himself while the aliens show remarkable forbearance are Rihanna in her acting debut (for which she won a Razzie), John Tui as the big guy who isn’t Dave Bautista, Tadanobu Asano as the guy who should have been in charge and Jesse Plemons who gets a pass because he's good in everything.

Of course you can’t have a movie called Battleship without… the incredibly boring game of Battleship. The setup for this was actually one of the more interesting scenes when Asano reveals that the Japanese Navy uses tsunami warning buoys to track enemy ships via their wakes. Luckily the tsunami buoys are arranged in a regular grid pattern so you can just fire on coordinates like B-11 and A-5 instead of doing complicated math and accounting for prevailing winds and wavelengths relating to hull dimensions.

Meanwhile on Oahu, Kitsch’s girlfriend (Brooklyn Decker) and the world’s angriest double-amputee actor who also happens to be a Colonel in the U.S. Army (Gregory Gadson) hook up with a SETI scientist (Hamish Linklater) and learn of the alien’s nefarious plan to… call home. Mind you it’s 100% certain that the alien home planet already knows where their expedition went so it’s not like anything vital is being leaked here. However the landbound trio does warn Kitsch and his plucky band of misfits (plus a few hundred other crew that don’t get billing) but they prove ineffectual and the aliens are forced to reluctantly sink the last Navy destroyer.

Of course you can’t have a movie called Battleship without… and is there the movie shines… an actual battleship. And in the very last part of the movie, we actually get one and it is almost worth the wait.

The USS Missouri, a museum piece is hauled out of mothballs by a retiree crew, many of whom were actually former sailors. I don't know that for certain, but they all moved with a confidence and decisiveness that made me believe they knew their way around a ship, something the rest of the cast had yet to demonstrate. It is these 20 minutes that makes this movie a guilty pleasure of Admiral James Foggo who gave it a charitable 2 out of 10 for realism when ranking movie sea battles. It helps that in a movie dominated by CGI, the Navy actually took the Missouri out for a spin so they could film these scenes.

And then everything after that is kind of epiloguey. Which is what this move feels like, the closing of a story.

Everything about this movie reeks of a bygone age. The lovingly gratuitous CGI destruction of a major city (Hong Kong in a desperate effort to cultivate the China audience), the unnecessarily complex spinning of alien weapons, the fetishistic Michael-Bayesque devotion to the US military and blue collar workers are all things we've seen many times before.

Battleship belongs to that genre of summer blockbusters that began with Independence Day in 1996 and was already tired by the time Iron Man burst onto the scene in 2008. Even the choice of lenses and lighting have that late-90s feel to it. I can’t really describe it, but it was how directors used to indicate characters were in Mexico before color correction did the same thing by putting a yellow tint on everything.

Ironically, this parallels the history of the battleship itself. Like a summer blockbuster they were meant to be a powerhouse, dominating anything that stood against them. But a decade or two after they were create they were already obsolete. Just as air power rendered the battleship nothing more than an expensive target, superheroes, with their charismatic quipping had replaced faceless enemies and endless shouting of “Clear!” and “Move, move, move!”

Suffice to say, Battleship doesn’t even crack the top three of movies about battleships.