Battleship (2012)

The end credits for Battleship say it was directed by Peter Berg, and screenplay credits were given to Erich and Jon Hoeber, but if you can find any significant evidence of their authorship you are a more perceptive person than I. These folks had a hand in constructing the film, sure, but there’s never any doubt that the real control over the final product went to the executives at Hasbro Studios; the newly-formed company with the mission of turning all your favorite childhood toys and board games into mind-numbing blockbusters. Hasbro decided to dive head-first into the movie business no doubt because of the success of Michael Bay’s Transformers series, and Bay’s influence is evident in every last frame of Battleship. It is more carefully-constructed and less outright offensive than the average Bay film, but it is still no more than a protracted, mostly mindless exercise in explosive battle scenes that occasionally becomes a brazen Navy recruitment video.

Battleship is also Hollywood’s second attempt at making Taylor Kitsch a movie star after John Carter, and the good news is that he asserts himself very well as Naval Lieutenant Alex Hopper. He’s spent most of his adult life as a slacker, and that barely changes once he enlists. It doesn’t help that he’s dating Samantha (Brooklyn Decker), the daughter of his boss Admiral Shane. Just when he’s about to get kicked out, an alien attack begins just off Hawaii’s coast and it’s up to him and his fleet to try and stop it. Their weapons? A series of peg-shaped missiles that implant themselves on the side of the ship and then explode, potentially destroying said ship if it’s hit with too many. If you’re a patrol boat, it might only take two. Larger ships, I'd imagine, might even take four or five.

The film’s references to its source “material” are few and far between, but it’s little touches like that which remind the audience that they’re watching an adaptation of a children’s game. This becomes even more obvious later on, when Kitsch and his crew—which includes such cast members as Jesse Plemons and Rihanna—attempt to shoot down the alien ships by yelling out letter-number combinations that correspond to their potential position. It’s a lot of silliness, but at least these silly moments have a bit of life to them. Battleship otherwise adheres to the formula determined by the blockbusters that have come before.

This film is like Transformers in all the obvious ways, sure, but it also makes the very Michael Bay-esque decision to drag out the first act as long as possible. When an audience goes to see Battleship, they want to see an explosive naval fight between Americans and aliens. Why, then, does it take so freaking long to get to that? One of the most glaring early sequences shows us Taylor Kitsch attempting to win over Brooklyn Decker, and he does so by breaking in to a nearby gas station to get a microwaved chicken burrito. Not only does this happen, but we watch as he goes to the gas station, discovers it is closed, breaks in to the tune of the Pink Panther theme, and eventually gets tasered by the police. We then jump forward quite some time to see him as a troublesome member of the Navy, and he’s still dating Decker. There is no reason for the film not to begin there. That way you remove a solid ten minutes (possibly more) along with wholly unnecessary exposition. A film is free to take its time if it is doing honest character work that will make the film better later on, but these early scenes serve almost no purpose. No one expects Battleship to be 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it would have been best served to get to the action as early as possible.

Not that the action is all that interesting in and of itself. The good news is that Peter Berg proves to be a more competent director than Bay; his visuals are slightly more appealing, and he makes the bold choice of actually letting us see what we’re looking at. The problem is that the context for the action is so profoundly uninteresting, and it’s ultimately just more of the same metal-on-metal chaos that we’ve grown so accustomed to. While the design of the aliens themselves is actually quite interesting—and a nice antidote to the tentacled slime balls we’ve seen so much of lately—the design of the spaceships and weapons seem like they were picked up off the floor of the Transformers storyboard room. The most glaring example is a round saw-like weapon that is used to sink ships and/or destroy Hawaiian freeways, which is just a slightly livelier version of something seen in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies. Whenever those items showed up onscreen, I was immediately uninterested.

Battleship is admittedly not as terrible as it probably should be, but it also refuses to live up to some of the ideas it occasionally floats out there. (That’s right! Actual ideas!) The aliens aren’t here just to destroy, and there are several moments when they actively choose not to kill earthlings that are standing in their way. There are many times when the humans are actually the more violent of the bunch, and at the end of the film we have probably caused more casualties than the aliens have. (The most truly catastrophic event in the film is an accident, as one of the aliens’ communication ships crashes into Hong Kong after hitting a satellite.) This may have been something Berg wanted to dig deeper in to, but ultimately the toymakers upstairs were probably the ones that pulled him back.

I’m also not quite so sure Berg was planning for the pure recruitment ad that is the last act of his movie. I’m not necessarily going to go into details, but during one montage set to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” there might as well have been a subtitle that read “Visit Navy.com today for more information!” There’s nothing inherently wrong with a “support the troops” sentiment, obviously, but it’s a good indicator of how calculated this whole project is. (By the way, if you go to the Navy’s website, you are immediately given the option to play a browser game entitled “Operation Battleship.” Hooray for cross-promotion!) There’s plenty of promise in Battleship, but it’s frequently derailed by the anonymous men in suits upstairs. Currently the Wikipedia page for Hasbro Studios lists all the projects they have in development, and they are as follows: Battleship, a remake of Clue, Candy Land, Stretch Armstrong and a fourth Transformers film. If auteurism is still alive, you certainly won’t be able to find it here.

Grade: C