You’re an alien ship full of unknown armament. Me? I have a machine gun. Ready, set … run!
Battleship (2012), purportedly based on the old plastic/board game popularized by the admission, You sank my battleship!, is actually a surprisingly good example of the alien invasion genre, by which I mean I thought it would be atrocious, and it actually held my attention, as well as my Art Editor’s.
Why? Partially because the aliens are not entirely inscrutable. While it’s not completely clear why they came in response to signals from Earth, and certainly they shouldn’t have arrived as quickly as they did, when they do arrive, they lose their communications ship to a collision, and that shapes their subsequent actions.
It makes sense.
Nor are they irritatingly impregnable. The three guided missile cruisers that have the pleasure of the first encounter, while not successful in stopping the aliens, do inflict significant damage on the alien ships.
Amusingly – at least for this obsolete old software engineer – their computers have bugs just like Earthly computers have bugs. And misclassification is a bitch.
Finally, the Earth forces, finding themselves at a disadvantage at several turns while on a desperate mission to save the world, find impressively clever ways around their problems.
Sure, this isn’t perfect. Beyond the usual credulity problems associated with the genre, the lead character is an excruciatingly example of the smart guy who makes bad decision after bad decision, and the Why of that is never quite clarified. The actor who plays the lead, Taylor Kitsch, I’ve only seen, to my knowledge, in one other movie – John Carter (2012) – and I didn’t like him in either flick. Not that I need to personally like him, but in both movies he just doesn’t play the role convincingly. But the supporting actors, I felt, did a good job, playing their roles both earnestly and professionally. While a hidden grin or two is sometimes acceptable, I didn’t sense them here. Roles are played straight.
It’s not an awful movie, which makes its nomination for several of Razzie awards puzzling. I’ve sat through some truly dreadful movies, far worse than this or, for that matter, the aforementioned John Carter, and I truly didn’t feel Battleship needed to be dissed in this way. Perhaps some folks objected to its purported and far-fetched origins.
And don’t forget. The original Battleship game had more than battleships. It had subs and cruisers and an aircraft carrier.
And a mighty battleship.
If you like the alien invasion genre, Independence Day (1996) may set the bar, and Battleship doesn’t quite get over it. But on its own it’s a fun little flick to watch.
