zondag 20 mei 2012

Someone please sink this battleship...

Battleship: Rating **/*****, or 3/10

It seems the alien invasion subgenre of science fiction is in full decline as far as quality is concerned, though when it comes to quantity, it's rarely done better. The last few years numerous alien invasion films have invaded our movie theatres trying to rule the box-office, but most of them failed due to humanity's natural resilience against bad movies. Last year's examples include Skyline, Cowboys & Aliens, The Darkest Hour and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but on the 'badness' scale none of these were a match for the stupendously dismal World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles, which chronicled the fight of a rag-tag group of marines against a vastly superior extraterrestrial intelligence. It was a complete defiance of logic and a total waste of everybody's time and money, particularly for the audience – okay, so I can get in for free, but I'd still like those two hours back...– Now Battleship comes sailing into the cinemas to pull off the same trick (i.e., bore the audience some more at the expense of their no doubt hard earned cash that had better be spend on something more worthwhile), except it takes the fight to the seas instead of rehashing the land based routine. And in the process it manages to defile the name of a classic board game, on which it claims to have been based, though the connection is hardly ever present, other than in the simple presence of a battleship.



Apparently using the concept of one fleet of ships being pitched against another and taking each other out was either not politically correct in the current climate, or the studio executives considered it too boring. So the line of thought seems to have been that if there's no human adversaries to combat, the threat must come from outer space. Battleship opens with an expositional scene explaining the existence of large radio telescopes on Hawaii which are used to send signals to a distant solar system that might contain an Earth like planet. Lo and behold, the signals are received and the resident aliens return our call of hospitality by sending in an invasion force which crashes into the Pacific – except for one starship which hits downtown Hong Kong instead, resulting in the typical levels of destruction à la Armageddon, spectacular but devoid of emotion – around the same time a huge international naval exercise is underway in that area, featuring participants from many countries, and of course led by the good ol' United States ready to gallantly defend our freedom from foreign agressors seeking to take it from us (think Independence Day, except with less impressive results on all fronts).

Naturally, a face must be put on the heroic side to make the resulting drama (what little of it there is amidst all the action anyway) feel compelling, and that face belongs to Taylor Kitsch, in the role of Lieutenant Alex Hopper. Kitsch recently managed to save Mars from internal political turmoil by uniting warring factions against a common enemy in the epic space opera John Carter, so this next task should prove easy enough for him. Alex is kind of a rebel, a loudmouth screw-up with problems adhering to authority, who is about to get kicked out of the navy, much to the chagrin of his more responsible and successful older brother Stone Hopper (portrayed by everybody's favorite True Blood vampire actor Alexander Skarsgard, no fangs) who hoped the navy would provide some much needed stability for his loose gun kid sibling. To complicate matters, Alex is madly in love with the daughter of Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson in a typically commanding performance, something we're used to in his case), so the admiral holds him in great contempt and is all too eager to dismiss him from the service. Fortunately for Alex, aliens conveniently come and provide an opportunity to prove his worth and set things right, saving his love life and his career.



Warning! Here be spoilers! During the navy war games, strange objects are spotted in the ocean, at which point the admiral dispatches three vessels to investigate, including Alex's. Upon closer inspection, the objects turn out to be (very digital) alien spaceships which immediately deploy a huge force field, which envelops the Hawaii islands, and cuts the fleet off from the three destroyers locked within, after which a cat and mouse game ensues between the human and alien warships involving a lot of gunfire and explosions. Why the aliens can't simply protect themselves with separate force fields instead of proving to be all too easy to destroy with simple cannon fire is just one of the many questions the conflict raises over the next hour and a half. Within ten minutes two out of three navy ships have been destroyed and all officers including bloodsucker Eric Northman have been killed off, so Alex gets his chance to shine and kick some alien ass, accompanied by his distrusting crew who give him the benefit of the doubt only to find he can do the job after all. Among the ranks we find the recording artist Rihanna, offering some female empowerment in her first film role. Don't worry, she doesn't sing, and neither does she do much acting.

The aliens' interest in the Hawaii islands, other than their stunning natural beauty and fantastically sensual beaches of course, is focused on the presence of the aforementioned telescopes, which the aliens mean to commandeer so they can call in reinforcements from their home planet, since their space craft downed in China apparently was the only ship capable of communicating with home base (yeah, that makes perfect sense, if you take your audience to consist solely of morons). The action of Battleship therefore is not limited to the ocean, but also witnesses a struggle on land between the aliens and a small group of valiant braves consisting of Alex's girlfriend, a local telescope scientist and a crippled marine with prosthetic legs, attempting to foil the evil schemes of the invaders. Of course the girlfriend is total eye candy, the scientist is a stereotypical hairy nerd who turns to cowardice (after all, science created this mess which the navy must now clean up) and the ex-marine feels like an uncomfortable attempt to give credit to the many battle scarred troops in the armed forces who might not be compatible with the hard business of soldiery anymore but can still prove to be useful human beings when it comes down to it. A noble sentiment, but not the best time to express it if you want the audience to take things seriously.

The movie proceeds to press the latter point too much when the plot calls for a new ship to save the day after the three destroyers have met the fate their class name suggests they should have done to the enemy. Only one true battleship remains, the near legendary USS Missouri, and though it's a museum piece she's still ready for action, as is the sturdy crew of very old veterans who preserved her and get called upon for active duty once more. And so the movie reaches its lowest point when we see these seniors walk down the decks in excessive slow motion as truly heroic characters, reporting for duty in order to save the day. Any sense of seriousness this movie might have offered before this point now gets completely undone in a single moment of utter camp, while it remains unclear whether this is what director Peter Berg (also responsible for the not so funny superhero spoof Hancock) intended.
And so the final battle for the fate of the planet begins, when the Missouri squares of against the vile extra-terrestrials all by itself guns fully blazing. It proves to be as tiresome and overly loud a confrontation as the rest of them, and all too soon forgotten when the lights in the theatre go on. In fact, though the action might deliver some minor entertainment during the course of the movie, none of it proves memorable, also due to the obvious levels of computer generated imagery that never makes the invaders, be it the aliens themselves or their vessels, feel convincingly real. What's worse, in the heat of battle even the battleships feel overly pixelized at times. The design of the extra-terrestrial aggressors is also lacking originality, except for the silly beard like appendages on their face which makes the threat and thus the film itself that much harder to take seriously (if the platoon of old folks hadn't ruined it completely yet). And when you take into consideration that their motives for attacking humanity are never explained and clearly badly executed, it's obvious Battleship is yet another pointless addition to the plethora of lame alien invasion films that have plagued moviegoers for the last few years. Being based on a much beloved board game does not excuse studio executives to regurgitate their recent failures.

The original Battleship board game was a game of wits and skill, but the resulting movie employs neither and appears to be nothing but a haphazard attempt to out-Bay Michael Bay by applying his noisy and irritating style of action to yet another Hasbro owned toy franchise (as if the Transformers trilogy wasn't headache inducing enough), undoubtedly also intended to sell more Hasbro products. The latter might not be a bad suggestion, since saving the money for two tickets for this film can buy you the board game instead, which is guaranteed to make for more fun for two than watching the Battleship movie could ever hope to achieve.

Oh well, at least we still have The Avengers to remind us alien invasion films can still be done right occasionally...


And watch the trailer here:

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