Razzies beware! I feel sorry for Taylor Kitsch - his two exorbitant multi million dollar epics are both doomed for the list of films that never come close to recouping their insanely high budgets. The first, John Carter, was truly awful and Battleship was no different. His last chance will be Oliver Stone's Savages, due later this year.
Battleship, based on the Hasbro board game, was a terrible idea from the start. Film out of a board game? Come on. I'll give you Jumanji but that is all can even dream of accepting in this thankfully meager sub genre. Battleship suffers from the same abject vexing syndrome that the latest Peter Berg movies suffer from, namely Peter Berg. His last two films, The Kingdom and Hancock, were objectively awful and nearly universally panned by all. Thankfully he switched up the cinematography for this movie because that was the main source of irk in his prior films. It was like watching yourself drown in a infnite vat of your own odious secretions while trying to focus on your neighbor's wife undressing. Some pleasure but so irrating that you would rather just give up and let yourself expire. Instead of poor cinematography we find a script written by teens and delivered by their unwanted children.
A bizarre story for sure, it becomes clear rather quickly that this movie deserves some credit because it will most likely become a cult hit. Battleship almost masters the art of being so awful that it becomes hilarious. The aliens are probably the stupidest I have ever come across. They clearly have technology far beyond our own and yet they can't even defeat a dilapidated analogue battleship with a crew of octogenarians. Of course our American ship can defy the laws of physics, however. These super original bionic lizards are easily destroyed without their machine suits (reminiscent of the V saga). They seem able to conjure great energy for force fields two miles in diameter but not for their own ships which are easily destroyed by regular missiles. They have awesome destructo machine balls that rip through the strongest metals but the brilliant creatures who have conquered time travel decide to deploy these last, because first they must fire dozens of unreliable explosive pegs inspired by the board game. Their own satellite to phone home is destroyed upon entry to Earth because apparently they don't understand that they can't crash into matter in space without adverse consequences. These aliens deserve to be obliterated.
It's one non sequitur after another and thus every 10 minutes I felt like I missed half an hour with some salient plot point missing which is just plain bad and indolent storytelling. I won't even mention the irrelevance of Rihanna and the cyborg human fight. Treat Battleship as a rental for a rainy day that you may enjoy for it's complete lack of substance.
Recommended Viewing: Very Bad Things - The Rundown - Independence Day
Bob Scale: Objective: 4.5 - Subjective: 5.0
MetaCritic: 40
Rotten Tomatoes: 36
IMDB: 6.3
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