Battleship: Spoilers, Discuss, Yadda, Yadda, Yadda

So, anyone brave going to see this yet?

Does it have what it's going to take to knock Avengers off #1?

Does it live up to the mythology of the game?

 

Knock off the Avengers, not a chance. Live up to the game, mission accomplished. It was much better then I hoped for. Yes a battleship gets in on the action manned by vets, sort of like The Segal movie Under Siege. There is a night battle sequence which plays out like the game. While there is no "you sunk my battleship" we get a close quote.

 

Yeah, I'm sure it doesn't have a chance hell of even touching Avengers.

I'll probably go see this tomorrow night.

 

I'll pass. This has Independence Day 2 written all over it.

 

Think more Battle:LA without the realistic battle tactics. There is no President leading a fighter wing. The previews are misleading in the battle scenes and humor content

 

It was better than I expected. Somewhat predictable, and I could have done without the screw up needing to ask the admiral's permission to marry the daughter.

I did like the vet finding his 'fight' again. Predictable, but fun.

I gave it a B-, but I have to say there's something cool about a battleship firing a broadside salvo into an alien ship.

 

I've just seen it.

It's stupid. It's not even "good stupid." The story is just idiotic, even for an alien shoot-em-up movie. Not only that, but it's like the writers packed in every navy war movie cliche they could think of, and it was just bad luck that they only remembered the cheesiest ones.

"But A2," you say, "you sang the praises of Battle:LA and it had just as many cliches!" True, but as already mentioned it had more accurate battle scenes, which were also more intense...and the aliens were a hundred times more interesting. The bad guys here were like the Hirogen...without the personality.

The only reason I gave it a "C" is because I'm a naval enthusiast, and I just like to see real US Navy ships maneuvering around. Of course, I was a little dismayed in the first act when the DDG's trapped in the bubble only fought back with their dinky 5 inchers. I'm like "What part of GUIDED MISSILE Destroyer do you not understand?" Then they remembered for the Battleship game scene and started shooting anti-ship Tomahawks like that was all they were carrying. (Burkes usually carry 6-8.)

Then they turned Missouri from a museum to a functioning battlewagon in like five minutes. Not even Bill Adama could do that. Not even the crew of Space Battleship Yamato could do that. And then they just start lugging around a shell the weight of a Volkswagen.

Whatever. The full Iowa-class broadside was cool.

 

My Voyager memory is kind of hazy. Are you referencing the aliens code of conduct which allowed John Paul Jones to survive when the rest of the squadron was lost? It reminded me of the predator movies and their hunter ethics. Until the cops showed up to say the roads to the mountain was cut I could not understand with all the red and green codes why the highway was blown up but then they were acting like no collateral damage whould be allowed or surrendering prisoners should be harmed.

 

Well I got a free ticket to this today. I wasn't really planning on seeing it, but since it's free I'm gonna go take a look.

 

I'm sure this has been out here for a month or so, can't say I want to see it.

 

The Hirogen were Predator-wannabes that at least talked. The Battleship aliens were Iron Man-wannabes that didn't talk and didn't like bright light like Gremlins. Don't think too hard about it.

And there's nothing ethical about the Predators' actions. They don't attack unarmed and/or non-aggressive prey. That doesn't mean they give a damn about collateral damage. They just find such targets boring.

 

I was thinking about Predator 2 when he let a pregnant Maria Conchita Alonso go. I just saw the battleship aliens as soldiers following their laws of war. They attacked the highway to cut off the mountain, after which they let civilians alone in the rest of the world. When the John Paul Jones with cold guns turned off of her ramming attack she was let go. When Missouri made her turn to give a broadside they also hesitated, which did bite them in the ass.

 

C

Saw it for free at the midnight screenin' Thursday. I was one of about a dozen folks in the theater. To give y'all an idea...the midnight shows for The Hunger Games and The Avengers sold out the buildin' (eight screens), while Battleship couldn't fill a row in one screen. And I wasn't the only employee in there!

So, yeah, no chance of takin' out The Avengers at the box office.

As for the movie itself, it wanted to be Transformers so bad, ya could taste it. And the good guys only succeed because of stupid mistakes the bad guys make. First, they stop firin' on a known threat just 'cause it turns away, and second, one of the foot soldiers gives the scientist dude the equipment he needs to contact the ship from the island. Literally hands it to him and lets him go!

Also, I gotta wonder why the rollin' smart bombs didn't register a kid with a baseball bat as a threat...

 

Come to think of it, that was the Independence Day moment, where the old veterans on Missouri join the young sailors instead of veteran pilots volunteering to fly the F-18s that came out of nowhere. Yet then we have the weirdness of being at Pearl Harbor and no active duty shore sailors stepping up with the squadron survivors to join in this battle like the disabled soldier on the mountain did. Thinking about it now, plot points aside, the feeling was more Armageddon then Independence Day or Battle:LA

 

Who needs this when Syfy has American Warships on tonight. At least they're timely with their mockbusters.

 

Is that what happened? I've only seen a cam of the film and I couldn't make out what happened when the alien soldier walked in on the scientist.


This film was stupid. But it was also fun. I give it a B because it is just that, a B Movie.

 

It seemed like the aliens in the gold armor were not all in with the mission, they were not the grunts in any case. It was like the kid with the bat and the spinner bomb. He wasn't seen ad a threat, so go in peace

 

No, the good guys do not succeed at all. If you watch it critically, it becomes obvious that the humans are the villains and the aliens are the good guys.

Earth sends a message asking the aliens to come. And when they show up a bunch of super-jingoistic military goons shoot at them without provocation. Of course they attempted to defend themselves. And throughout it all, the aliens always acted far more humanely than their human counterparts, attempting to minimize the loss of life even as they were being slaughtered.

This isn't a case of Hirogen wannabes invading. This is a case of the military royally screwing up a first contact that could have been and should have been peaceful.

And blowing up the NASA array was almost certainly futile and counter-productive. When the aliens send a search and rescue group to find out what happened to their scouts, they're going to be incredibly pissed off at humanity.

 

I'd put Battleship on about the same level as the first Transformers (which it is stylistically very similar to for obvious reasons), though with better humor that doesn't resort to being crass. It's enjoyable fluff with some great action/FX scenes. I was pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was, though, and there were a couple scenes that made me and the audience cheer.

The necessary callbacks to the game were done in a clever way that didn't detract from the story -- the alien artillery rounds look like the game pegs and at one point the stealthy opponents are blindly hunting for each other at night using a lettered and numbered grid display based on the location of wave displacement buoys, which was cool.

As is usually the case with alien invasion movies, the aliens either have strange motives, counter-intuitive behavior, or absurd weaknesses that somehow allow the ragtag human survivors to defeat them, and this film is no exception. However, if you can forgive an alien fleet being able to be taken down because their systems are Windows compatible, you can forgive anything in this.

The gleefully cheesy parts are when the old battleship vets who operate the USS Missouri museum do their best Right Stuff walk toward the camera to help our surviving heroes save the day by getting the ship ready to sail from port. The audience loved that. Plus, the AC/DC musical montage as they prepared the ship for battle was delightfully 80s.

Some poignancy came in to the story when real-life Army vet and double amputee Gregory D. Gadson got to play a recovering vet who's depressed and whose confidence is shot until he has to rise to the challenge to protect his civilian companions from aliens trying to jury-rig a radio telescope. The biggest cheer from the audience came when he with his (real) powered prosthetic legs squared off against an alien in its exoskeletal armor.

This movie is not anywhere near the league of the excellent Avengers, and certainly won't compete with it in terms of box office. But if you enjoyed movies like Independence Day and the first Transformers (not the sequels), and would like to see huge warships duking it out with aliens in completely outmoded line-of-sight naval combat for some inexplicable reason, you'll probably enjoy this film. I'd give it a "B."

 

^^ Come on now, be realistic, we all know aliens only use Macs.