Review of Battleship

There are films, and then there is Battleship. 131 minutes of explosions, tedious exposition, and lots and lots of yelling. The problem (or at least one of the problems) with Battleship, isn't that it's mindlessly stupid (though it is), or that it contains poor acting (though it does), but that it's profoundly boring. There are times when I nearly dozed off - despite seeing this in the early afternoon after a full night of sleep - and times when I resorted to checking my watch - despite doing so a minute prior. Battleship is one big, bloated, boring, bomb of a film. But if you aren't convinced yet, by all means, read on.

Supposedly inspired by the Hasbro board game of the same name (I'm sure I don't need to tell you that there are almost no similarities outside of their title), Battleship is about a troublesome weapons officer named Alex Hopper, who must lead a small group of navy soldiers against a fleet of aliens. And that is the entire plot.

Battleship really only has enough story and character development to create a 90 second film (plus credits), so how director Peter Berg got a two-plus hour film out of this is beyond me. The aliens don't show up until about the 30 minute mark, which actually isn't so bad when you consider that films like Jurassic Park or the recent Godzilla film wait 45 minutes to an hour before showcasing any real monster action. The problem here is that those 30 minutes feel like 30 hours because the characters are dull as dust, and there is nothing to hold our attention.

What's even more shocking is that the film actually gets worse when the aliens arrive. And this is why: at least before the aliens show up, there are things to occasionally laugh at (unintentional comedy only; none of the intended gags actually work). There is terrible acting, terrible dialogue, ridiculous character oversights, etc. And while most of these things remain in the preceding 100 minutes, they have worn out their welcome long before this point. And what's more, we realize that the monstrously bad opening only revealed a fraction of this film's many problems.

For one, none of the action is even a tiny bit engaging, which is a massive issue, because most of this film is taken up by said action. There are a number of reasons the action doesn't work.

1. We're not invested in the characters in the slightest, conceivable form. Obviously, with the exception of the feminist-pleasing Cora Raikes, none of the characters have any personality. We don't care for any of them. And in the case of the main character, we flat out don't like many of them.

2. Nothing looks real on account of some of the ugliest, cartooniest, and cheapest looking CGI I've ever seen. I was never convinced that anything on the screen was real. The special effects are laughably bad at times. People give the Star Wars prequels a lot of hate for the massive amount of CGI, but if you showed those same people Battleship (which I wouldn't even wish upon my worst enemies) they would find the Star Wars prequels to be increasingly appealing.

3. At some points, you can't even tell what's going on. A lot of the action just appears to be explosion montages.

4. There's nothing here we haven't seen before. The action scenes are just a bunch of shooting, and that's it. There is no variety. It's just ships shooting at alien ships. At two brief points, there is hand-to-hand combat with aliens, but one these is done in a purely comedic way, and the other is suffers from inconsistencies with alien's capabilities. And that's another reason the action doesn't work:

5. Battleship is never consistent. At certain points (especially the beginning) the aliens appear to be ultra-strong and perhaps invincible, with the humans leaving hardly a dent on their spaceships or armor. But as the film progresses, the aliens become increasingly weaker for no apparent reason.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

There is a side story involving Alex Hopper's girlfriend, Samantha, and a double amputee soldier that accomplishes nothing outside of occupying an extra 30 or so minutes of the movie. Various questions about the aliens and their abilities are raised but never answered. This isn't done in a tastefully ambiguous way, so much as it was done to allow for cool shots to take place, without the inconvenience of explaining what they mean.

The design for the aliens - whom we don't actually see outside of their armor until about the halfway mark - is laughably bad. They just look like bald men with prickly beards. Their armor look like Halo/Storm Trooper rip-offs. And their spaceships are clunky looking, and totally forgettable.

The only vaguely entertaining aspect of Battlefield (outside of some unintentional comedy early on) is the amount of clips and camera shots the film re-uses over and over. There are times when you think to yourself "didn't I see this shot of that satellite earlier?" And of course, the answer is "yes," just 30 minutes ago. Many, many, many parts of this film are recycled into other scenes which makes the film seem all the more lazy. At one point, the same image of alien blasters charging appeared twice within two minutes (I know because I was checking my watch for most of the film).

The acting is awful at worst, and bland at best. Taylor Kitsch doing his best Batman vocal impression for most of the film, has mastered the appearance of looking confused and bewildered. He retains these expressions for most of the film, when he's not frowning or having the scene stolen by the nearest empty wall. Rihanna (yes, they allowed her to act) gets to do a bit of yelling, and Liam Neeson gets to do a bit less yelling. Brooklyn Decker and Gregory D. Gadson embarrasses themselves in laughably performances.

Steve Jablonsky's score is an atrocity. Messy electric guitars, melodies that have no more than single note, and themes that rip off Harry Gregson-William's theme from the Narnia films (perhaps a temp track issue?). It's loud, repetitive, and diverges into a number of action film cliches including dubstep, the horn of doom, and repetitive electronic melodies. The nicest thing I can say about Jablonsky's score is that it's better than the accompanying soundtrack (stuffed with bombastic rock-oriented songs), but so is getting one's toe extracted. And I haven't even mentioned the completely ill-advised use of the Pink Panther theme in one scene that surely has Henry Mancini rolling in his grave.

A lot of Battleship's defenders have insisted that this film is a good time if you just "turn off your brain." And despite the many problems I have with that particular line of thinking, I agree in that a brainless action film can sometimes be fun. However, Battleship is no fun at all, no matter how much of your brain is intact. It's long, slow, and totally uninvolving. The acting is bad, the dialogue is worse, and there isn't even a remote element of fun in this movie. On a more positive note, the ocean appears to be real and not a CGI effect at least some of the time. It does its job at looking watery and blue. The rest of the film is sewage.

Score: 0/10