2012, Movies

Battleship (2012, Peter Berg)

I briefly decided to live blog this one twitter, the first time I ever tried, but frankly I just got tired. It’s hard to know what to do with this film, produced by a toy company, “based” on a board game, and full of every single Navy movie cliche in history.

  • There is a ridiculous amount of unnecessary backstory – apparently these people thought they were actually making a legitimate movie.
  • Kitsch’s character should never have a job in any armed forces ever.
  • The alien ships are giant mechanical frogs, or giant mechanical water spiders, or something.
  • And on and on and on.

It’s just brutal. Cataloguing the terribleness felt like a chore after about 10 minutes. (How do they see missiles – which are flying through the air – on a map of tsunami buoys? Etc.)

But due to “night” and some damage, everyone is actually forced to play Battleship, and the Ex and I just looked at each other. We had hope they weren’t going to go that far.

But it’s when they commandeer the USS Missouri that the movie really goes off the rails, from an occasionally entertaining, terrible, over-made blockbuster that has some overtones of a US Navy commercial, to a full-on ad for the US Navy and an unbelievably cringe-worthy “celebration” of US Navy veterans, with a little help from AC/DC. This part pushed an already pretty terrible movie to new levels of corn and ridiculous patriotism.

I laughed once, early on, at one of the lame jokes. And that is the only thing I can think of redeemable about it. This is one of the worst blockbusters ever made. No matter how much money you throw at a bad idea, it remains a bad idea. And no matter how many Hollywood actors and CGI you throw at a Navy ad, it’s still a Navy ad.

P.S. At least I learned that old people – I mean veterans – matter.

1/10

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