It’d be hard for anyone to watch Battleship and not think of the Transformers franchise. So alike are they in everything from the humongous budget-backed action set-pieces to the very fact that they’re both based on a Hasbro toy that the comparisons are not only obvious but just.
Nevertheless, Battleship is a damn sight better than Michael Bay’s overblown and tiresome robots VS robots movies not least because it cuts out a lot of the filler and attempts at (crass) humour and leering misogyny. The film, while not exactly breaking any new ground, is a more than competent summer blockbuster with one giant action sequence crashing into another with the sort of pace the Transformers series can only dream of.
Battleship follows Alex Hopper (played by Taylor “Why do they keep putting him in big movies?” Kitsch), a smart but reckless Navy officer who is part of a crew taking part in a cross-nation training exercise. Seemingly as a result of a satellite signal sent out from Earth to a planet in another solar-system, the planet suddenly finds itself under an attack from aliens. It’s then up to Alex and the rest of the Navy at hand to fight back.
In what is part alien invasion “who’s got the bigger gun?” battle-off and part advertisement for the US Navy, this is about as far as you could stretch the idea of a movie based on a board game involving two players sitting on either side of a vertical board shouting out letters and numbers. No amount of explosions and special effects can make us forget where this action beast came from. However, director Peter Berg (now used to having a couple of hundred million dollars to play with) at least delivers on the promise of spectacle. It’s also done in a way that’s focused, if sometimes repetitive, and never falling into the Transformers trap of having too much going at once and letting the audience get lost.
At a whopping budget of $200 million things are undoubtedly spectacular to look it – there’s absolutely no mistaking that this thing cost a lot of money. It’s part of a trend of Hollywood movies that cost a lot and are pretty much guaranteed to make their money back; for this in particular it has the name recognition (the only plausible reason for making a movie from the board game and still keeping the name) and the comparisons to Transformers which will grab audience interest even if it’ll be detrimental to its critical reception.
The story or characters aren’t fleshed out that well, particularly when it comes to the main character, and Kitsch isn’t the sort of actor who can carry a role if that’s the case (as he proved very much with the financial disaster John Carter). The rest of the cast is peppered with a lot of people you’ll recognise, some big (like Liam Neeson in what is a textbook case of a pay cheque role) who will make you wonder why they’re even in it, to people who you’ll recognise but not know their name. And, of course, there’s Rihanna in her first movie role. It’s quite a surprise to discover she’s not the horrible actress you might expect from a successful pop star trying their luck at the movies, though she’s hardly Meryl Streep either.
Borrowing from the likes of Transformers, Battle: Los Angeles, Independence Day, Halo and even Predator (the list goes on), Battleship is the loud, bombastic and “action above all else” movie you’d expect. Some may find its not-so-subtly-masked jingoism as tough to take as its nonsensical nature, and those hoping it to buck the trend of overly long blockbusters will be sorely disappointed (131 minutes is a long time to watch stuff blow up). But when so much effort has clearly been spent on making at least the action not only palatable but entertaining the film, in spite of its many issues, succeeds in what it sets out to do. In a time when these kinds of movies are a dime a dozen in the multiplex, you could certainly do a lot worse.
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