Battleship: Spoilers, Discuss, Yadda, Yadda, Yadda

[SG-17]

od0_ital wrote:

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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...

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.

[Star Wolf]

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

[hyzmarca]

od0_ital wrote:

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C
And the good guys only succeed because of stupid mistakes the bad guys make.

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.

[Locutus of Bored]

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."

[Mr. Adventure]

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

[Admiral2]

Star Wolf wrote:

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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.

The problem with this comparison is the ultimate goal. Predators are not invaders in the martial sense. They come down to Earth to hunt. They pick off a few humans that can defend themselves, collect their spines as trophies and go home. They don't go after humans that can't offer a decent fight. The one that spared Maria Conchita didn't necessarily care about the baby. He probably just thought a woman who was pregnant would be less physically capable of defending herself than one who isn't. Again, this is not evidence of any ethical sense on the part of the aliens.

The Battleship aliens are invaders in the martial sense. They sent troops and ships and immediately set about trying to achieve strategic goals. They closed off the area around the Hawaiian Islands to almost all ship and air traffic, then used the ships they brought to deal with the ships they missed and used the troops to take and hold the NASA station to use as a comms station. Yes, they let one ship go when it backed down, but then they had to deal with that same ship over the next several hours, and after it finally decided to sink the thing, it let the crew get to another ship to finish the fight and destroy their comms station, which got compromised because they let some NASA geek and a physical therapist with nice tits do whatever they pleased without incident. On the face of it this looks chivalrous, like with the Predators, but it's just as likely that the aliens were suffering from mind-blowing stupidity.

This is a problem in a literary sense, because chivalrous/stupid aliens that will let you screw them as long as you're not acting aggressive are not scary, and alien invaders that don't frighten anybody make for horrendous alien invasion movies. The aliens in Battle:LA were frightening on some level. So were the aliens in Independence Day. The aliens in this movie were a joke.

Which brings me back to my original comment, which had nothing to do with any code of honor on the Hirogen's part. The Hirogen were non-scary aliens the typically clueless writers of Voyager tried to pass off as Predators, while the Battleship aliens are non-scary aliens that the writers of this movie tried to pass off as War Of The Worlds Martians, and the one thing the Hirogen have over the Battleship aliens is that the Hirogen at least talked once in a while.

This is why I said don't think too hard about this. We're talking about stupid aliens in a stupid alien invasion movie.

Star Wolf wrote:

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Come to think of it, that was the Independence Day moment, where the old veterans on Missouri join the young sailors

No that was the Under Siege moment. Literally stolen from a Steven Seagall movie...

instead of veteran pilots volunteering to fly the F-18s that came out of nowhere.

The Hornets came off the carrier once the barrier was down. In Independence Day several pilots were on leave, leaving several planes available after the aliens' initial attack.

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

And yet, Armageddon was still a better movie.

[Balrog]

I'm holding out for the movie version of 'Hungry, Hungry Hippos'

[Star Wolf]

Admiral2 wrote:

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No that was the Under Siege moment. Literally stolen from a Steven Seagall movie...

The Hornets came off the carrier once the barrier was down. In Independence Day several pilots were on leave, leaving several planes available after the aliens' initial attack.

And yet, Armageddon was still a better movie.

The way I saw Independence Day was the President leading a WWII sized airwing made up of Randy Quaid and other Vietnam vets to attack the Area 51 mothership, after Will Smith's and presumably the rest of the west coast fighter squadrons were already lost in the initial battle. Thus the F-18s that came out of nowhere comment and the Independence Day moment from the film. It was not a reference to the Ronald Reagan F-18's which saved Missouri. Curiously I have seen The Right Stuff more recently then Armaggedon, yet the strut of the veterans reminded me of the roughnecks making a Right Stuff inspired strut also. I mentioned Under Siege too, just not on this message board's thread

No I did mention it, post #2, confusing these multiple conversations are

[RAMA]

C-, mainly for some nice alien FX....otherwise, it was pretty stupid. What sort of strategic advantage would aliens advanced enough to make it to Earth after a recent message into space have by fighting in the water instead of the air or space? Why are they firing missles with scarely more power than Earth missles? Why did the lead protagonist of the movie spend 10 minutes looking for a chicken burrito?

[Gaith]

And why must a crap trifle of a movie like this be over ninety minutes long, let alone two hours and ten?

[Disruptor]

Mr. Adventure wrote:

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

Mario Van Peebles stars...Sonny Spoon's gonna get his rappin' POSSE and go New Jack City on those aliens.

Edit: I watched most that and have to say that it was terrible not even in fun-terrible way. Carl Weathers spends most of the movie in a Ramada Inn convention room talking to some guy with a bad fake accent.

Van Peebles represents the fine standards of the US Navy by have an affair with an officer under his command.

US stealth bombers and Chinese jet use the same cockpit and helmet designs.

When they said they were sending mothballed ships and museum aircraft to aid the Iowa, I almost expected Snoopy on his flying "Sopwith Camel" doghouse to arrive.

I think one minute of BATTLESHIP footage had 10 times the budget of American Warships.

[Admiral2]

Disruptor wrote:

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Mario Van Peebles stars...Sonny Spoon's gonna get his rappin' POSSE and go New Jack City on those aliens.

Edit: I watched most that and have to say that it was terrible not even in fun-terrible way. Carl Weathers spends most of the movie in a Ramada Inn convention room talking to some guy with a bad fake accent.

Van Peebles represents the fine standards of the US Navy by have an affair with an officer under his command.

US stealth bombers and Chinese jet use the same cockpit and helmet designs.

When they said they were sending mothballed ships and museum aircraft to aid the Iowa, I almost expected Snoopy on his flying "Sopwith Camel" doghouse to arrive.

I think one minute of BATTLESHIP footage had 10 times the budget of American Warships.

Well, at least the junior officer was hot (she was Gannett on ENT once upon a time...).

What kills me was they were walking around on the deck next to the main guns while they were firing. Just walking around. In real life they'd be deafened and slammed flat with each shot. Do any of these people read a book?

[Star Wolf]

Gaith wrote:

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And why must a crap trifle of a movie like this be over ninety minutes long, let alone two hours and ten?

My partner was saying that the movie seemed short to her. It may not be great art but it doesn't drag.

[Locutus of Bored]

Yeah, it didn't feel long to me. Berg spaces out the action and humor well so that it doesn't get too boring or tedious.

[Admiral2]

Locutus of Bored wrote:

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Yeah, it didn't feel long to me. Berg spaces out the action and humor well so that it doesn't get too boring or tedious.

I'll admit, boring isn't it's major problem.