In the history of bad sci-fi movies, has their ever been an alien invasion as purely idiotic as the one portrayed in Peter Berg’s Battleship? I strained to think of one that tops this Hasbro produced board-game adaptation, but even when titles like Plan Nine from Outer Space and Oversexed Rugsuckers from Mars entered the equation, their meager silliness turned out to be no match for this.
Consider; when Hawaii scientists send a friendly transmission signal to Planet G (it has the same potential for life as Earth), what they get back is a five-ship strong recon mission led by extraterrastials who look like Halo’s Master Chief after a rough night out. These aliens have crossed the distance of the cosmos with incredible ease and speed, but once they get here they behave like the cast of McHale’s Navy. Their ships resemble giant skiddoos and can do little more than hop across the water in short bursts, they wreck their communication platform on the way in and it smashes into China, and if they are really just a scouting mission then why do they begin breaking bad on Earthling infrastructures a mere ten minutes after they arrive? For sheer incompetence they deserve a kicking, even if their ability to wear protective army does put them well ahead of the naked aliens from Signs who forgot to fact-check that issue with the water.
Applying pesky logic to Battleship is a fool’s errand, and the movie has been birthed not out of a genuine desire to tell a story but from Hasbro’s need to synergize another brand name in the wake of the Transformers and G.I. Joe success. Instead of dusting off the My Little Ponies, they chose a wonky 80’s boardgame that sought to simulate naval war strategy but was mostly notable for how stupidly easy it was to cheat at. I assume the only reason the plot involves aliens and transforming ships is again because of all the greenbacks Michael Bay’s robot saga stirred up. Somewhere along the line, scriptwriters Erich and John Hoeber took turns reading the plots of all previous genre films about aliens into a magic 8 ball, shaking it, and then choosing bits based on that. The result is a mishmash that feels completely erratic despite having been designed according to traditional action beats.
So, yes, the script is a giant mass of reheated junk burning through the multiplex at the speed of dumb. What’s surprising though, is that director Peter Berg manages to inject enough energy and humor into the proceedings that, after a rocky first act, Battleship becomes a genuinely funny summer comedy. The characters are wafer-thin, the action absurdly illogical, and the actors mostly bland and superficial but I got more genuine laughs from this SYFY original on steroids than I did from The Dictator and Five Year Engagement combined. When the third act comes around, and we get a ‘man the torpedoes’ montage set to ACDC involving a highly unlikely crew prepping an even more unlikely ship, I challenge you not to smile.
There’s still plenty that’s wrong here, but for disposable summer entertainment, Battleship bests Transformers by being mildly coherent and not completely cold on the character front. Berg uses the sensibilities he brought to Friday Night Lights and The Rundown to make this mess feel like something approaching human. After the obligatory set-up for an invasion, he gives us an interesting and silly prologue where Taylor Kitsch breaks into a convenience store in front of security cameras to retrieve a burrito for Brooklyn Decker .It’s as dumb as everything else, but it’s not the type of character moment one usually launches such a large action pic with and as such, it’s refreshing. Of course, by staging scenes like this, he makes the following thirty minutes of exposition and set-up—used to get Kitsch, Rhianna, and Alexander Saarsgard onto Navy destroyers and in Hawaii for the locked-down alien assault—completely redundant.
While Taylor’s Alex Hopper and his hilariously named brother Stone Hopper (Saarsgard), are getting their rears handed to them by the alien ships, Decker’s physical therapist walks up a nearby mountain with disabled army vet Mick Canales (played real Iraq veteran Gregory D. Gadson) and runs into Cal, the tech nerd running the sattelite the invaders want to hijack to phone home. There’s even a Japanese officer onboard Kitsch’s ship, played by Japanese star Tadanobu Asano, who has apparently ‘graduated’ from offbeat foreign fare like Ichi the Killer and Last Life in the Universe to American popcorn pics like this and Thor. Everyone but Liam Neeson, playing Deckard’s terse, Navy commander father, gets in on the action; he’s excluded because, along with the rest of the world, he’s on the other side of a sealed dome the aliens have used to secure the area.
It isn’t until the alien beacon rises from the deep and the ships start whirring to life, that Battleship really becomes any fun to watch. Once they do, everything sails along in a sort of mocking, blissful stupidity. On one hand, Berg delivers exactly the kind of bloated toy commercial the studios no doubt wanted. Those critters in their mechanical suits have discardable helmets that hide refugees from a He-Man cartoon, while the alien’s primary weapon is a kind of sentient yo-yo made of razor-wire that zooms destroying things as it goes. To watch it in action is to see the pre-emptive marketing for a Bey Blades movie. In one of my favorite bits, they actually include the grid-based gameplay of the original ‘source material’ by having Asano and Rihanna track the alien movement by the water displacement around weather buoys, the enemy vessels visualized as blips heading toward a little battleship marker on-screen.
But on that other hand, Berg installs the kind of tried-and-true cheese that some summer movie connoisors have come to expect. Kitsch, Rihanna and Saarsgard are all serviceable in their roles, but they don’t register with any tension or interest. The same is true of Decker (whose delivery is weaker than the others mentioned) and Neeson is so sidelined that he doesn’t register at all. So, it’s actually inventive that the less recognizable faces and (surprise!) non-professional actors are utilized the best. Of note is Gadson as the disabled war hero who’s built like a linebacker but has two prosthetic legs. He feels like a gimmick at first, but like everything else in the movie, is given such a bold and ridiculous payoff moment that we end up cheering for him as he goes up against an alien invader with nothing but his fists. The scene that directly precedes this one, with him sizing up his opponent, became one of the most sublimely crazy things I’ve seen in movies this year. That is, of course, until that stoic hero’s walk aboard the Missouri a few minutes later. You know, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t even in slow motion.