The toy company Hasbro has had a licence to print money with the Transformers franchise, so it was inevitable that one of its boardgames, too, would eventually get milked for blockbuster payday. Battleship, though? Turning a grid-based strategy game everyone dimly remembers playing into a $200 million effects extravaganza certainly required gumption, but if it smells like folly and looks like folly, folly it most probably is.
What we get is many things and none. It’s a preposterously lunkheaded salute to American naval machismo. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a digital action spectacle, bolted together from ill-fitting parts of other movies. And it’s arguably the noisiest film ever made. Imagine a mash-up of Independence Day, Top Gun, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, with the combined decibel levels of all four.
It doesn’t help that the performances would more fittingly grace an adaptation of Jenga. Brothers Stone (Alexander Skarsgård) and Alex (Taylor Kitsch) — one respectable and buff, the other dissolute and even more buff — both wind up serving on a fleet of destroyers that run into a little bother in the Pacific. Stone is simply trying to get his arrest-prone younger sibling out of trouble, so wangling him a high-ranking position on a fully armed military vessel seems just the ticket. In a subplot Jane Austen might have been proud of, Alex, meanwhile, hopes to impress their gruff admiral (Liam Neeson) and gain his comely daughter’s hand in marriage.
Meanwhile — the movie is all meanwhiles — aliens are zooming towards Earth, their target a satellite station manned by total geeks up a mountain in Hawaii. These aliens are absurd. They stomp around in chunky robosuits, and are loath to take their helmets off, which is understandable once you get a look inside. They have prickly yellow chin-fuzz and look more or less like Nick Nolte’s drunk-driving mugshot.
For the most part they confine themselves to vast, spiky aquatic craft, erecting a force field to prevent fighter planes strafing them from on high, and shooting forth whirring razor-balls of pure destruction to topple bridges and threaten kids’ baseball games on the mainland. Explanations for any of this are thin on the ground — you get the impression that whoever wrote each new draft of the script (there were many) decided it was theirs not to reason why, theirs just to hand over proceedings to the frazzled effects team as often as possible.
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