Battleship: A review

Battleship
Rating:PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours 11 minutes
Staring: Alexander Skarsgard, Taylor Kitsch, Brooklyn Decker, Liam Neeson
Review: 2.5/5 stars

I admit that I had no desire to screen what I thought was sure to be another Hollywood executives PG-13 bad idea. It's no secret that over the past few years Hollywood has seemed to run out of original ideas and have turned to rehashing, remaking, rebooting, reimaginig and generally rewarming ideas.

But when we're young we're taught to "never judge a book by it's cover" and that prejudice is wrong in any and every situation. Apparently the new film "Battleship" was made specifically to remind me of these lessons.

Still, as many fun nights as I've had playing Monopoly at the family table,  I've never had the thought "Hey, why doesn't Hollywood spend $200 million making a live-action, CGI saturated movie based off a less fun game?"

But, believe it or not, I'm writing and you're reading a review of that very movie. Surprisingly, it's not as bad as one would expect. Especially considering Hasbro based movies have been (like Battleship gameplay)  "hit" or miss. (Transformers I and III were huge hits while Transformers II and G.I. Joe was considered by most as complete failures.)

The plot, like the game it was "based on" is simple. Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) plays Alex Hopper, a bad boy who's attempting to straighten up his act and win the approval of his girlfriend's US Navy admiral dad by following in his big brother, Stone's Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood) footsteps and joining the Navy. Luckily for Alex, he gets the chance to prove himself when aliens from an earth like planet begin an invasion. 

Predictably, these aliens seriously outgun us and upon arrival immediately follow the playbook of all alien invaders who have visited (and destroyed) us in theaters during past summers à la Independence Day but via Transformers-like CGI weaponry.

Also, as with Transformers, one of the highlights of "Battleship" is the humor that paces the film from one fairly predictable scene to the next.
But when the story requires  intensity, emotion is manufactured by using slow motion panoramic close ups (straight out of the Micheal Bay's summer school of cinematography) to alert the audience to the gravity of the situation. Confused? Think back to any climatic scenes in the Bad Boys or Transformers franchises and picture Will Smith and Martin Lawrence or Shia LeBeouf with the sunset heroically framing their stoic looks.

By invoking the "We're gonna go in there and kick-ass despite the odds" attitude of films complimentary to the American military (literally The Right Stuff), director Peter Berg (Collateral) gets us to pick a dog in the fight. Instead of just waiting for the predictable resolution of the film, we actually cheer on the heroes moxie and feel patriotic pride while the aliens learn how serious we are about Pearl Harbor, where (not- so) coincidentally, most of the film's action takes place.

The cast, overall does an adequate job even when handicapped with the script's sometime hokey dialogue. No one actor's performance is mentionable other than to say that Rhianna's big screen debut wasn't horrible. Liam Neeson is seriously overqualified in a role overtly reminiscent and maybe an unintentional parody of Bruce Willis' character in Armageddon.

Battleship borrows so many elements and cliches from hit films of the past 30 years (like Top Gun, Independence Day, Alien, Transformers, Super 8, Iron Man, Armageddon and to a lesser extent Pearl Harbor) that it edges close to spoofing the respective genres. But it never crosses that line and works (please know I'm using this word generously)  as it's own story because it takes so much from those other, better movies from the same (more or less)  genres. It's a Frankenstein monster of a movie which sum total is stronger than it's parts. Although rated PG-13 for violence, Battleship actually can be an entertaining family outing, (for those without young  kids.)