Review - Battleship

Grade: C-

So, imitating Michael Bay is a thing now?

I was always under the impression that, despite Bay’s success, no director would ever want to consciously ape Bay’s signature style, with the exception of Tony Scott and Dominic Sena of Gone in 60 Seconds fame. 

Peter Berg apparently doesn’t share that perspective.

Berg’s Battleship is a ham-fisted hodge-podge of the worst Bayisms committed to film, particularly those culled from Transformers--obviously--and Pearl Harbor. Battleship follows the meteoric rise of slacker-turned-seamen Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) who was shotgun enlisted into the Navy by his big brother, Stone (Alexander Skarsgard), after raising the ire of the Hawaiian police during an attempt to impress the attractive, vapid Sam (Brooklyn Decker), who just happens to be the daughter of a Navy admiral (Liam Neeson). At the same time Alex was courting Sam by burgling burritos from the local Circle K, a pair of NASA researchers (Hamish Linklater and Adam Godley) discovered a new planet mere light years away that could possibly sustain human life. In the absence of a credible deep space exploration program, the boys at NASA decide to send a homing beacon to the planet. What could go wrong? One year later, Alex is a lieutenant, preparing to participate in annual Naval war games off the coast of Oahu while NASA’s Oahu signal relay station finally gets a response from their signal to Earth-2. Within hours, a small squad of Cybertronian aircraft makes its way to Earth-1 and begins transforming and wreaking havoc across the planet with weapons that look vaguely like the red pegs from the original tabletop Battleship game. Three of the crafts plop down in the Pacific, right in the middle of the RIMPAC challenge between Alex and Stone’s fleets and a Japanese fleet lead by Hopper’s noble rival, Captain Nagata (Tadanobu Asano). Faced with the Go-Bots advance team, Hopper and a crew of misfits must do all they can to stop the transforming menace before it claims Earth or raises the ire of the Autobots, whichever comes first.

From the sun-drenched palette to the ridiculous slow-mo and 360 shots to the garish infatuation with military personnel and hardware, every element of Battleship is ripped, part and parcel, from Michael Bay’s imagination. The aliens are Transformers, no way around it. The only difference is that these Transformers are manned by pilots decked out in Master Chief armor. The cast is a conglomeration of diverse cut-outs that include a music star (Rihanna in a decent turn that produces the best line of the movie), a disabled vet who won’t be conquered by his injury (Gregory D. Gadson), and a cadre of real-life veterans. Kitsch’s Hopper is practically Armageddon’s A.J. Frost with a hint of Tim Riggins. Brooklyn Decker is Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s Carly from Dark of the Movie. I could go on, but I’d be forced to take a shot for every character from Battleship that matches a character from a Bay movie. 

Berg not only rips Bay’s palette and casting strategy, he manages to snatch Bay’s simplistic approach plotting, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in the hands of the write director, and makes a plot that’s less sensical than Revenge of the Fallen. For instance, the aliens come to conquer earth but leave the entirety of their fleet in deep space, waiting for the advance squad to activate NASA’s homing beacon. Somehow, the an army of Chitauri movie made the leap in the Avengers, but these guys, with their transforming spaceships, couldn’t do the same? 

Battleship is, indeed, a senseless, shameful knockoff of the Transformers franchise and Michael Bay’s vision, but it’s so similar to those films that any fan of Transformers and the rest of Bay’s oeuvre will be at least mildly entertained, as long as they don’t apply any amount of thought to the proceedings. At its best, Battleship is adequately-made crap--a loud, dumb experience filled with explosions, which is exactly what is to be expected of such a typical summer tentpole. Then again, what more should have been expected of an summer tentpole that turns a tabletop guessing game into an alien invasion flick with Transformers.

Yin, Yang and In-Between:

Yin: Big, loud and dumb, just like the Michael Bay movies it is ripping off.

Yang: Loud, simple, and filled with explosions and transforming robots, just like Michael Bay’s hit Transformers movies.

In-between: Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) has now been in two more mainstream movies than Vinnie Chase. Ari, do your job, man.