Battleship

This week, Evan and I saw Battleship. Of course we did. I'm not saying we're suckers for bad movies, but ... no, actually, that is what I'm saying. We go in knowing full well we're going to bad movies, and we go anyway. We are pretty much the definition of suckers. Anyway, Evan already posted his review, which is ... succinct. I mean, we expected bad, but what we got was a huge, steaming pile of ship (Yeah, I'm not going to get tired of that joke, and I'd like to thank Eureka for instroducing me to it). On a completely different note, I'd like to brag that I called the GI Joe trailer about 5 minutes before it started (when we had our weekly "What's the first trailer going to be?" discussion). We tied on Snow White and the Huntsman (on the list), and I got The Bourne Legacy, taking the win for the week.

The movie starts in 2005, when NASA looks into space and sees an Earth-like planet. They decide to send it a message, which would be fine, except that right now it's only 2012. So the message would have only 7 years to get somewhere. The only stars within 7 lightyears are Alpha Centauri (a trinary system) and Barnard'sStar, a red dwarf which only appears to have tiny masses of rock orbiting it. Have we managed to send signals faster than the speed of light? And is this the fastest a movie has thrown science out the window?

Next, we get to a bar, where Taylor Kitsch is trying to impress a girl, who turns out to be the daughter of an admiral his older brother works under. Kitsch joins the navy as well (actually, his brother drags him in, in an effort to clean him up). He supposedly has a lot of talent but wastes it all. How do we know has has talent? He finishes a quote from Homer, and has apparently read The Art of War (which, by this point, is to the military what The Prince is to middle management. A lot of people have read it, but few get anything out of it, and most people just want to show it off on their bookshelf).

So, a time skip later, and it's time for RIMPAC, a joint naval exercise between several different navies, of which we only see the Americans (duh) and the Japanese (the Canadians showed up in a rowboat, but that was left on the cutting room floor). During the RIMPAC soccer game (complete with announcers, because the military takes everything way to far and too seriously), Kitsch gets fouled, insists on taking the penalty shot, then misses it high (and how many of us haven't missed it high? It's a common problem). The next day, he gets in a scuffle with the guy who fouled him (kicked him in the face, actually), and then learns he'll probably be kicked out of the navy.

Well, everyone goes out to sea, and then some aliens crash into it, a few hundred miles southwest of Hawaii. Also, one alien ship apparently got knocked off course when it hit a satellite and crash landed in Hong Kong. Scientists do tests and find it's made out of an element not in the periodic table. Yeah, that's not how elements work.

Three ships are sent to investigate to the crash in the ocean, but can't find anything on the radar. Thay can see it with their bare eyes, though, so the sent out Kitsch, Rihanna, and Cal Tui (who I thought should be wearing a red shirt, but I was wrong) out to investigate in a rubber dingy. Big mistake. The alien ships power up, and then it's ON!

There are all kinds of things wrong with this movie, not least of which that most of the deaths are either directly or indirectly Kitsch's fault. There's also the aliens, who suffer from two problems - one, their not sufficently advanced (sure, they can cross interstellar distances, but are vulnerable to battleship arms?) and two, they're ridiculously human. Sure, their eyes and heads are a little wider, and they have some sort of spiky goatee, but that's about it. Convergent evolution? I dunno.

There's also a scene where they actually tried to work in the mechanics of Battleship, including the "it's a miss" cry (but not "You sank my Battleship!") that seemed a bit farfetched. Their radar was out, but not their radio. Why not send a dingy out collect line-of-sight information? Why not keep changing direction after you shoot? Why not do several things different that real navies would actually do?

Next, the score is not that great. I thought it'd be better, considering it's by Steve Jablonsky, of Transformers fame. But I guess a second-rate Hasbro product gets a second-rate soundtrack. There are some good songs, though, so you might want to give it a listen and pick and choose your favourites.

Well, despite the massive amounts of quibbles, I actually had fun watching it. There's much more humour than I was expecting, and an epic lock-and-loadmontage set to Thunderstruck (hereafter known as the only music that lock-and-load montages should be set to). So I'd say it's a DVD movie. Far too many problems for a Blu-Ray movie, but too much fun to wait for it on TV. See it if you dare, but mock it or lose your sanity.