Thursday 14 March 2013

Battleship


Battleship

Hit? 

Miss?

It’s easy to be snobbish about Battleship.  It’s a movie based on a guessing game.  A guessing game that actually predates the First World War!  It then gained widespread popularity in 1967 as a board game.  Let’s face it, it’s not the most obvious candidate for feature film adaptation.

Recently, jumped up whiny comic book writer Alan Moore had a massive whinge about the lack of creativity in the entertainment industry, launching broadsides against Hollywood’s tendency to remake (or reboot) film franchises, regurgitate classic TV series’ of the ‘60s and ‘70s and make films based on theme park rides (Pirates of the Caribbean), even going so far as to suggest that one day soon Johnny Depp will be playing a breakfast cereal mascot.  While Moore has a point (though personally, I can't wait for Frosties: The Movie.  It'll be greeeeeaaat!), this kind of sniping could be considered a bit rich coming from an aging hippie pagan who writes comics about neurotic superheroes.  Moore should be tied down and made to watch Battleship.

It may be dumber than an Adam Sandler fan but it’s hard to deny that an admirable amount of creative invention has gone into Battleship.  Somehow, director Peter Berg and screenwriters Erich and Jon Hoeber have managed to create a serviceable blockbuster event movie from such a bare bones, ridiculous source.  It’s far from smart; it’s big, dumb, loud, schoolboy fun.  But it is fun.  In a mindless, over-the-top, square-jawed, ludicrously patriotic kinda way.  It has little pretension to be anything other than what it is; a piece of lunk-headed entertainment, the perfect accompaniment to the radioactive nachos, vat of popcorn and bucket of Coke you’re going to buy at the cinema’s concession stand.  If you’re the type of person who likes the Transformers movies (namely a teenage boy who’s never touched a boob), you’ll love Battleship.

Here’s the plot: stoopid brainiac scientists beam a message off into space looking for friendly aliens.  Unfriendly aliens hear the message and invade the Earth, landing in the Pacific just off the coast of Hawaii.  Thank God a joint US and Japanese navy taskforce, led by stern Admiral Liam Neeson are playing war games just off the coast of Hawaii.  With most of the taskforce stuck outside the aliens’ protective force-field, the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of naval loose cannon Taylor Kitsch.  And shapely-bottomed singer Rihanna.  Seriously.

Leaving aside for a moment the film’s virulent anti-intellectualism (It’s all the fault of those pesky scientists!  Grrr! Stamps foot, waves fist…), the frankly culturally insensitive idea of the US and Japanese staging war games anywhere near Pearl Harbour (after what happened the last time?) and that a civilisation that’s managed to develop faster than light interstellar travel hasn’t managed to develop radar, Battleship is an undemanding, entertaining waste of two hours of your life. 

It doesn’t matter that at no time do we learn what the aliens actually want with Hawaii (Hey! At least the aliens in Independence Day and Battlefield Earth were here to strip-mine the planet!  Who knows what these bozos want?).  Or why they’ve sent such a ludicrously small invasion force to subdue the Earth (4 ships guys?  Bit arrogant, there’s over 7 billion of us…).  Or even that we, the human race, strictly speaking kick off an interstellar war by shooting first.  Sure, it was a warning shot but how were they to know?  They’re aliens.  Up until the point where luckless naval officer Alexander Skarsgård fires a warning shot across their bows, they hadn’t done anything aggressive.  Maybe they were on holiday.  They may even have been a visiting church group.  We’ll never know, because the idea of actually attempting to communicate with the aliens, or even take some prisoners, is obviously, well, an alien concept to the US Navy.

But Battleship isn’t the kind of film to ponder these kind of questions.  This is fast-food filmmaking of the highest order, an orgy of explosive, cinematic mayhem.  If you’re thinking of these kind of questions during Battleship, you are not Battleship’s target audience.  You’re probably one of them pesky scientists that got us into trouble in the first place! 

The cast is adequate; Kitsch cements his leading man status with a charismatic performance and he and Ichii The Killer’s Tadanobu Asano as the gruff Japanese captain he joins forces with have real chemistry together.  Rihanna is pretty one-note (like her singing, hur-de-hur-hur) in the obligatory ethnic tough babe role that would usually be filled by Michelle Rodriguez, Liam Neeson barks ineffectually from the sidelines but looks damn fine for a man of his age in Naval dress uniform and the best thing you can say about model Brooklyn Decker, Kitsch’s love interest and Neeson’s headstrong daughter, is that she doesn’t bump into the furniture.  Though given she’s playing a physio taking a double amputee war hero (played by double amputee war hero Lt Col Mick Canales) on a nature ramble up a mountain, there really isn’t any furniture to bump into.

The biggest problem with Battleship though is its militaristic jingoism.  Berg is the son of a US Marine and it shows.  He’s made a dumb, popcorn action movie that’s rabidly, heart-on-sleeve patriotic, drafting in veterans of World War Two (the retired crew of battleship-turned-museum USS Missouri) and the War on Terror (Canales) in minor, if significant, supporting roles.  To all but an American audience, this naked, weepy love of country and our fighting men will seem embarrassingly simplistic, laughable.  But, if you’re looking for a film that questions American patriotism and foreign policy, again, you probably aren’t Battleship’s target audience.  Just sit back and enjoy the explosions. 

David Watson

Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Genres:
Language:
English
Runtime:
2 hours 11 minutes
Certificate:
12a
Rating:
3/5

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