The Scum Bucket is overflowing with bad movies of the past six months, ranging from what Travers calls "chick-flick torture" to movies that didn't even make it to theaters. Among the filthy flicks that were tossed into the bin were John Carter, The Lucky One, The Lorax, A Thousand Words, Wrath of the Titans and Mirror Mirror. Travers thinks that there's no question, though, that the king of scum so far this year is Battleship.
It is an inevitability that the line "I've got a bad feeling about this" will pop up in Battleship, a movie inspired by a board game, with all the innovation of a dot-to-dot puzzle. What makes Battleship special is the lateness of its deployment: the line pops up after the alien invasion, following the destruction of Hong Kong and once two of the (four-strong) fleet of tugs that are our only hope of salvation have been blown to bits. If you found Transformers just a touch too subtle, this is the film for you. It might still be even if you didn't: there's something of the big dumb puppy to Battleship, whose risible tricks unite the crowd in indulgent giggles. Liam Neeson is our steely commander; navy recruits Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård and Rihanna run about decks getting fetchingly wet and barking: "I don't know why – just make sure your ass is on it." It's also one of the noisiest films you'll see, soundtracked by the endless gargle of engine-room groans, with counterpoint from the hydraulically-powered armour in which our aliens lumber puffily about.
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.
