All-star slop on the high seas

Battleship
DIRECTED BY: Peter Berg
STARRING: Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgard, Liam Neeson
CERT: 12A

When we were kids, a friend of mine owned the Battleship board game. I recall he tried to teach me how to play one time but I wasn’t really interested. The game requires a certain amount of strategic thinking and I rejected it on the grounds that if you have to think too much, it isn’t really a game.
If I had known there were aliens involved, I might have been more keen.
But my friend never told me about the aliens. And he never told me about the aliens because there were no aliens. Not until Hasbro got into the movie business and decided that if their toys can make a bazillion box office bucks on franchise trash like GI Joe and Transformers, well hey, why not start pimping out the board games as well?
All you need is a good story, some valid reason for a bunch of naval destroyers to show off their muscles on the high seas, saving the world by blasting some dastardly enemy to the bottom of the ocean.
Only snag is, nobody really does that stuff anymore, not on a large superpower scale anyway. You could reignite the Cold War and let the Americans and Russians go at it but then you’d have to get all boring and political. Or you could fantasise about a massive US/Iranian/Israeli conflict and bring all the hot action into the Persian Gulf. But the guys in Washington are already working on that one.
Hmmmm, what to do, what to do? Wait… wait. Aliens! Of course! It will be a cross between Independence Day, Transformers and Top Gun, with added water! As Admiral Nelson said at Trafalgar, “What could possibly go wrong?”
Lucky for the old sea dog, he doesn’t have to sit through Battleship and perhaps conclude that there are worse things than a surprise bullet.
The aliens come to Earth when scientists discover a new planet and extend a cordial invitation to its residents. The visiting party crash-land in the Pacific and emerge from the sea near Hawaii. Unfortunately for them, there’s a US naval base nearby and the boys on the battleships are unaware of the new developments in inter-galactic relations.
Maverick sailor Alex (Kitsch) goes to investigate. Just a few minutes ago, Alex was a feckless slacker trying to impress a girl called Samantha (Brooklyn Decker). Samantha is a physiotherapist whose daddy (Neeson) is commander of the Pacific Fleet. Alex’s brother Stone (Skarsgard) is also a Navy man, a no-nonsense chap who thinks the military is the best place for his lay-about sibling.
So all of a shot, Alex is a Navy lieutenant, on his way to check out the mysterious intruders. He’s accompanied by Officer Raikes, a weapons specialist who likes to say “Boom!” She is played by Rihanna, who does no worse than anyone else on the payroll here.
Communication with the sea-faring strangers does not go well but rather than take a break for tea and perhaps come back and try to understand each other through, say, a bit of interpretive dance, the two sides plough ahead and do things the old-fashioned way.
Traditionally this involves shots being fired, followed by all levels of hell breaking loose. Now is not the time to be breaking with tradition.
On shore, the pretty but pretty-vacant Samantha gets in on the action alongside disabled Army hero, Mick, who’s played by real-life Iraq war veteran, Gregory D Gadson. They’re holding out with technical geek Cal (Hamish Linklater), who is also the comedian of the pack, as required by some unspoken law of screenwriting that has been in effect since the nerd boom of the 1980s.
The aliens, meanwhile, prove that they’re actually quite useless as this invasion stuff, by failing to destroy important national monuments simultaneously on several continents in many languages, to the horror of peasants representing all of the world’s major religions. But they do kind of look like the Transformers, which I suppose is good for their self-esteem.
The Earthlings don’t have that going for them but they do have courage, honour and flag-waving American pride. They also get to show off their big nifty destroyers and all their big nifty weapons, while engaging in lots of really bad dialogue. Which, as I have said here before, can be entertaining in its own way if approached with the right mindset, by choosing to find goodness in its unspeakable badness.
Then again, as I have also said, you might simply go raving mad, even more so when you consider that the summer blockbuster season hasn’t even begun yet and there’s lots more big stupid movies like this on the way.
I only wonder if sales of Battleship will increase and if the fans will be delighted to know that the new deluxe movie edition includes what Hasbro have identified as the leading threat to naval destroyers everywhere.
Aliens.