I mean, I can see it happening. Make it one of those killer crocodile flicks like "Rogue" or "Primevil" or maybe even "The Ghost & The Darkness." Hell, you could probably get Val Kilmer to headline it. He isn't doing anything. I don't recall ever seeing a killer hippo horror movie. They can make "Night of The Lepus" but they can't make a hippo a killer? Hippos are scary man. I read a story about how one accidentally ate a circus midget one time. The rest of the movie kind of writes itself after that.
So "Battleship." It is slightly difficult to know where to begin with this one, because on one hand, there is plenty...PLENTY that I could complain about. It would not be hard. Let's get one thing out of the way here, this is not Akira Kurasawa caliber film making. But on the other hand, I ask you, what should one reasonably expect to see when going to see a movie based on the board game "Battleship?"
D'oh! Okay, bad example.
The answer is, based on the trailers, a ridiculous amount of action with some high levels of cheese and possible camp. And you know what? That's exactly what I got. Although I could tear this movie apart bit by bit and stone by stone until all that is left is a hole in the ground, I really can't say that I feel that "Battleship" deserves it. There's just not enough terrible in the movie to make me mad enough to do it.
I had a good time.
What I found fascinating about "Battleship" was that it was basically what would happen if Michael Bay had the slightest shred of talent. Make no mistake, this could easily have been a Michael Bay movie. Hell, it practically screams it. The alien ships even kind of look like something the Transformers would ride around in. But it is free from all of the things that make Michael Bay movies so unbearably wretched. Here's a short list:
1) The comedy is kept separate from the action.
2) You can see what's going on with the action.
3) There are no brutally offensive and racist stereotypes.
4) None of the characters are annoying, shrieking jackasses.
5) It was 2 hours long (as opposed to 2 hours 45 minutes)
6) It doesn't contain over an hour of padding (see #5)
7) The camera doesn't do that annoying, dizzying "spinning around the characters thing" every 2 minutes.
8) No helicopters in slow-motion at sunrise.
*THAWUP THAWUP THAWUP THAWUP THAWUP*
I swear, if the people who made "Battleship" had made "Transformers," we might have gotten a trilogy of half-way decent films instead of the 8+ hours of putrid festering septic discharge that we received. Basically what I'm saying is that "Battleship," while silly and easily comparable to movies like "Transformers," conducts itself with far more dignity than the Michael Bay abominations.
But how did they turn a board game into a movie? Well, by alien invasion, of course. In this time of "Transformers" movies, I guess it's not enough to have big ships blasting each other to pieces with giants guns anymore. We've got to have ships that also fly and shoot stuff that isn't realistic weaponry. And I suppose since "GI Joe" and "The Avengers" already did a lot of that stuff, the makers of "Battleship" felt they should just do the alien invasion plot. You know, since that's original and whatnot.
The aliens came because we made the stupid mistake of trying to communicate with them with huge radar dishes. Naturally, they get the message and promptly say "Nice. Let's invade." So the aliens come ready to blow everything up, but for some bizarre reason, they only send a few ships. This isn't a full-out "Independence Day" level invasion here, this is more like a scouting party. After their communication ship gets destroyed during the landing, the aliens set course for the only other place on the planet they can call home: the dishes that sent the signal. And those happen to be in Hawaii. And fortunately for us, that's also where the navy is.
Don't MAKE Rihanna act more like Michelle Rodriguez at you...
At this point you'd think that the navy would start kicking some butt, however this is where the film takes a slightly annoying turn. The aliens throw up a defensive shield that walls them off from anything getting through it, and the navy happens to be on the other side of it. So Taylor Kitsch and Rihanna are our last hope, as the only ships inside the barrier are 3 destroyers.
What sucks about that is that while it does harken back to the game, with a small fleet and limited room, Liam Neeson is on the other side! That means that he is given essentially nothing to do for the entire film except scowl at the thought of Taylor Kitsch banging his daughter. That's a shame to waste such a great actor like that. Although truthfully I was expecting him to die in the first wave of attacks like 20 minutes into the film, so I guess it's nice that he lived.
And while I would hate to see him get blown up, I was imagining in my head Liam standing on the deck of his aircraft carrier...looking out at a the mushrooming explosion of one of his ships going up, binoculars slowly being lowered from his face as he sets his chiseled jaw, clenches his teeth a bit, and growls in his always-kind-of-there Irish accent, "You alien bastards. You sank my battleship."
That would have seriously made "Battleship" the best movie of the year. Automatically.
After the shields go up, from that point on it's really all about the action. Every once in a while it cuts back to the slightly annoying subplot of Taylor Kitsch's girlfriend, played by the not very charismatic Brooklyn Decker and an amputee solider working to stop the aliens on the mainland. It's not that it isn't good, it's just that it's predictable and honestly pretty boring after we just saw a destroyer LITERALLY get cut in half. Driving a Jeep into a power station can't really compete with that.
And in the end, like I said earlier, "Battleship" does its action very well and keeps every encounter with the aliens rather fresh and exciting. No fight is exactly like another. Probably the most different (and memorable) scene is the one we were all secretly hoping they would manage to fit in: the scene were they fire at coordinates. Oh yeah. They go there.
This is also the scene were the actor who steals the movie, Japanese legend Tadanobu Asano, really steps up to show that he is by far the most useful and interesting character in the film. Seriously. This guy blows everyone else on his side of the barrier away. He also has the funniest line in the film.
So do I wish there were more ships involved in "Battleship?" Yes. Do I wish they had used Liam more? Of course. Did the alien invasion make much sense? No. Was that fact offset by the fact one of them got shot in the face with a cannon? Oh hell yeah. So am I disappointed? Nope.
Although I always knew the aliens were keeping them hidden in the "J"s...
THE BOTTOM LINE - "Battleship" is a pretty fun time. Yeah it's loud and dumb and stupid and silly and all kinds of ridiculous and the plot makes little sense and everything else, but it's worth it to see how big, dumb and silly can be handled WELL, because I think we've forgotten what that's like. Recommended.
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