Battleship Review

From the very beginning, I thought this movie was a bad idea. I mean come on, Battleship the movie? Battleship the game is a very fun game by Hasboro, but it's not the type of game that you turn into a movie. There is no plot to the game. You are just attacking your opponent's ships and whoever sinks all of the other person's ships wins. A movie? No. That's about as silly as doing Chess the movie, Checkers the movie, Connect Four the movie, or Minesweeper the movie. It just doesn't make sense. But someone thought it would be a good idea and so it happened. I wasn't willing to pay a full ticket price, especially after the reviews confirmed my premonitions of this being a bad movie. But once it came into the dollar theater, I thought it would be worth a dollar. Ha! My, was I wrong. I really, really wanted my dollar back after that. Now I don't always report on every movie I see late, but this movie was so bad that I feel the need to say something about it.

Now if you watch the trailers for this movie what it seems like is a brainless action movie. And as a guy there are many times where I can enjoy that. I may walk out saying it was cliché and unoriginal, but at the same time it can be fun and entertaining. However, this wasn't the case with Battleship. It was just so confusing and weird that I couldn't be entertained. Now I expected it to be bad and thus went in with low expectations, but I didn't think it would be as bad as it was and it thus fell a lot lower than my low expectations.

So what was the problem? Well, let me give you a taste by describing the opening scene. Commander Stone Hopper (Alexander Skarsgard) of the Navy is in a bar with his brother Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch). It is Alex's birthday and Stone is telling Alex that it is great that he is a bachelor. However, at that moment a very attractive lady named Samantha (Brooklyn Decker) walks in to the bar and Alex, against his brother's will, says that he is going to try his luck with her. Now in this scene it is late at night. Now when this Sam girl walks in she tells the bartender that she wants a chicken burrito. Now I don't go to bars so maybe I'm not an expert on this, but I'm pretty sure that people don't go in and order chicken burritos too often, especially not this late at night. But nonetheless she does and is turned down. Being tacky, Alex walks over and after learning that she was turned down, tells her that he will get her the chicken burrito she wants. She is kinda cold, but says that she will give him five minutes. So he runs over to the convenient store next door which happens to be just closing and he is a few seconds too late. So he climbs on the ceiling and breaks in through the ceiling and steals a chicken burrito. And of course he leaves 3 dollars on the counter. Then he climbs back through the ceiling, falling twice. When he gets out, a huge crowd of police are there to arrest him. While trying to escape the police for a second to deliver the chicken burrito to Sam, he gets tasered. Twice. But manages to successfully deliver the burrito to Alex. Then we cut the scene to the brothers' house. Alex is taking a bath in ice. Luckily we don't see any nudity, but we almost do which is disturbing. Then the brothers are talking and towards the end of their conversation Stone tells Alex that Sam works around the Navy and continues to inform him that he is joining the Navy. End scene. Enter Battleship title screen.

What in the world just happened there? I have no idea why all of that had to happen. It was probably the dumbest opening scene that I have ever seen in a movie. Surely to introduce this supposedly epic Battleship movie they could've come up with something more clever than that. It was as if a 5 year old boy wrote that. After watching that it was one of those times where you say to yourself, "What? Why did that happen? Please don't happen again." But the issue is that it keeps happening. And it doesn't stop until the movie itself is over. Let me give you a few more short examples. This giant alien ship comes down to earth, but to transport itself it can only bounce across the water like a frog - it can't fly. Said ship at times can completely destroy whole ships in matter of seconds, but at other times it can't destroy a raft of three soldiers that are right in front of it and at other times can't aim worth crap. An alien comes down and in a duel with a legless black man it is revealed that the only weapon this alien holds is a small knife. Small alien robot machines are launched and instead of destroying important Battleships or other things that would weaken the humans it continues to destroy several unarmed helicopters, a kid's baseball field, and some concrete pillars holding up a freeway. At one point of time something falls into the water. Logically we then zoom in on a large shark swimming around. That shark is not important, does nothing, and does not make a reappearance later on. Similar to that, while two characters are on a walk on the mountain hiding from aliens, we zoom in an a herd of horses that, once again, don't see them again in the movie. It goes on and on.

Now you get why this movie is terrible? If anything it is good for two hours of laughs. I almost want to declare it the comedy of the year. It's the type of movie that would be really funny to watch on a Mystery Science Theater 3000 type setting. The sad thing is they really tried hard to make this an epic movie and it thus falls flat on it's face. The script and story line is terrible throughout like I have mentioned. Visually it is alright, but there are many things about the aliens that are just weird. The acting isn't horrible, but the actors don't have anything to work with. Speaking of the cast, it's kinda odd. Most of the cast is just average. It does have one great actor in Liam Neesen, but he isn't used hardly at all. Instead singer Rihanna and model Brooklyn Decker are given a much bigger acting role. Then there is Taylor Kitsch. As the lead role he isn't terrible, but he also isn't that impressive at all. He did much better in John Carter. Speaking of that, though the guy is becoming a flop king. He's been cast in two movies this year that were supposed to be epic and both flopped hard. Poor guy. Also, the music is misplaced and makes no sense in most scenes.

I could probably go on for longer on how bad this movie is, but I will stop here. I honestly can't give this movie a rating that is higher than a 1 out of 10. Please, save yourself the pain and torture and just skip this movie.