Meet our plucky hero. He doesn't always get on with his family, he's a bit of a bum, struggling to find his place in the world and he doesn't have a job. Despite all this, he has a gorgeous supermodel for a girlfriend. When aliens land on planet Earth, he and his friends are all that stand between us and them, our last line of defence, humanity's only hope. No, I'm not reviewing Transformers 3, this is Battleship, the film based on the board game of the same name.
Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) is the eponymous hero, impressed into the U.S. Navy in 2005 by his elder brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard), after he is arrested trying to impress the beautiful Samantha (Brooklyn Decker), who just happens to be the daughter of Admiral Terrence Shane (Liam Neeson). Meanwhile, NASA has begun transmitting signals from Hawaii to an Earth-like planet in a habitable zone orbiting a nearby star. Seven years later, Alex is a lieutenant with an attitude problem and Stone has command of his own ship. As the brothers prepare to take part in that year's RIMPAC at Pearl Harbour under Admiral Shane, scientist Cal Zapata (Hamish Linklater) and his assistant Danny (Christopher McGahan) intercept a strange signal. I'm not saying it's aliens. But it's aliens.
Four alien ships crash down into the pacific ocean near Hawaii and three destroyers close in and investigate. One of the alien ships erects a force field and the three others engage the destroyers. Two of the destroyers are sunk, killing Stone. After several officers are killed on Alex's ship, he assumes command. Meanwhile, Admiral Shane and the rest of the fleet are trapped outside the force field; Samantha, an army physiotherapist, is hiking with double amputee Mick Canales (Gregory D. Gadson) and the aliens land on Hawaii and commandeer the NASA transmitters to summon reinforcements from their home planet. Alex bands together with friends from his ship and survivors from the others, including gunner Cora Raikes (Rihanna), Japanese Captain Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) and crewmen Walter Lynch (John Tiu) and Jimmy Ord (Jesse Plemons).
As night falls, Alex and his ship literally play Battleship by judging the position of the alien ships based on readings from buoys, sinking two of them. On the island, Cal flees from the aliens and runs into Samantha and Mick. Together, they resolve to destroy the facility and stop more aliens from arriving. When the sun rises, Alex and his crew destroy the third alien ship, leaving only the force field and the ship guarding it. With their destroyer badly damaged, they decide to re-activate the battleship USS Missouri for the final showdown.
Films that give actors top billing and then kill them off quickly or feature them in barely more than cameos annoy me. Battleship does it twice. Alexander Skarsgard is killed off after forty-five minutes and Liam Neeson gets barely ten minutes on screen. Instead, the painfully wooden Taylor Kitsch leads the proceedings, "supported" by the dreadful Rhianna, who should clearly stick to her day job. I had expected supermodel Brooklyn Decker to be almost as woeful as Rosie Huntington-Whiteley was in Transformers 3 but she's actually not bad.
Dreadful acting aside, the film takes forever to get going. Fifteen minutes is wasted on a pointless scene showing how Alex and Samantha met back in 2005 and another in the present day as the brothers play a football game against a Japanese team in the build-up to the naval exercises. After that, it's another fifteen minutes of Alex being an asshole and getting himself into trouble before the aliens even appear on the radar. When they finally land, battle is not joined for about ten minutes as we have to endure a standoff as everyone looks through their binoculars and wonders what to do. Of course, it's the humans who fire first. What better way to welcome some intergalactic visitors than to fire a warning shot at them! After sinking two of the destroyers, the alien ships launch "shredders", giant spinning balls that bounce along the ground and destroy the air base on Hawaii. If they look familiar, it's because they bear a striking resemblance to the flaming balls that the Trojans attack the Greeks with in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. The film as a whole is basically Transformers at sea but other influences are clearly visible, from Independence Day to Pearl Harbour and even The Final Countdown. Whilst Battleship compares poorly to all those films, it is at least better than Transformers 3. It may struggle with pacing and take ages to get going but mercifully it clocks in at twenty-three minutes shorter than T3.
Some ruthless editing and better casting would have helped but even that wouldn't have covered up for the lack of ideas and poor script. When they're reduced to actually playing Battleship, you know they're struggling for ideas to fill the time. When the USS Missouri is re-activated, that does at least present some nice footage of the venerable old battleship. Alex's crew are assisted by World War Two veterans who currently look after the ship in its current capacity as a floating museum but when you put the visual to one side it leaves a rather baffling question: why not recruit more recent veterans instead? Having octogenarians crew the ship is a silly idea. The Missouri was re-activated in the 1980s and served during the First Gulf War so the old men would not be familiar with the upgrades installed some forty years after they last crewed her. But hey, why let a silly thing like common sense get in the way of some good old-fashioned American flag-waving? Speaking of common sense, the moment when the forty-five thousand ton battleship turns at a right-angle because Taylor Kitsch drops the anchor is one of the most egregious examples of the laws of physics being shit on in a Hollywood blockbuster since the whole of Armageddon.
Acting, pacing, the script and moments of sheer idiocy aside, there's still very little to recommend here. There are some fancy explosions but when most of them are preceded by someone saying "boom" or "welcome to Earth, motherf...." (yes, it's cut off, a la Die Hard 4), the enjoyment is quickly sapped. Still, at least the aliens are cool, right? No, I'm afraid not. They spend most of their time clonking around in giant suits and even though they regularly punch characters with enough force to break bones, our heroes just get back up and carry on fighting. As for what they look like without their helmets on, think of the vampires from I Am Legend with toothpicks on their chins. Oh and they have the same sensitivity to light too.
"It's better than Transformers 3" is really the only positive thing I can think of to say about this film. When blockbusters are getting so bad that the only good thing you can say about them is "well, at least it's not the worst one I've ever seen", you know that standards are slipping. Poorly acted, badly written, with plotting and pacing problems aplenty, Battleship is a dismal, boring film. That's two hours and eleven minutes of my life gone that I'm never getting back.
In summary: Battleship is battleshit.
3 out of 10.
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