One star. Rating: PG-13, for intense action violence, mayhem and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.18.12
Battleship is a movie for folks
who found the Transformers flicks too intellectually challenging.
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| Alex (Taylor Kitsch), hurled into command when every other senior officer gets blown up, shredded or otherwise sliced 'n' diced by nasty alien weapons, seeks inspiration from the screen monitored by Petty Officer Second Class Cora Raikes (Rihanna). Now, if she'd burst into song, that might improve this dud. |
Erich and Jon Hoeber’s laughably
moronic plot would make a great discussion topic in a fifth-grade science
class, where 10-year-olds would gleefully pick it to shreds. Let’s start with preposterous
coincidence, total ignorance of physical reality, and an invading alien force
bearing nasty weaponry clearly capable of wiping us off the planet ... except
when the script says no, we can’t let that happen in this scene. Just because.
No lie: At times, for absolutely no reason, the massively armed alien warrior ships simply don’t fire upon our
sitting-duck ocean vessels. Beats the hell out of me.
I’d call this flick a cartoon,
but that’s an insult to animators. And it’s not even a decent comic book movie,
because that genre’s writers have been operating at a much higher level of
intelligence since, oh, the early 1960s.
But, then, what should we expect
from a film based on a board game?
The one-dimensional characters
here, so insubstantial that I’d expect them to blow away in a stiff breeze,
speak in clipped grunts that would have been retro in the Cro-Magnon age. I
truly worry that if one of these folks attempted a three-syllable word, he’d
forget the first by the time he reached the third.
Except for the token Scientific
Geek, of course, who’s both a technobabble motormouth and a clichéd liberal
wimp: We can’t have those pussies getting in the way of real soldiers
determined to wipe this alien scum off the face of the Earth. John Wayne — who
you’ll recall turned 1968’s The Green Berets into a notoriously pro-Vietnam
War screed — would have loved this flick.
Actually, that’s always been one
of my many objections to actor-turned-director Peter Berg. Bad enough that he
makes dumbed-down nonsense apparently aimed toward trailer-trash intellectuals;
he’s also jingoistic and frequently racist. His 2007 take on our American
presence in the Middle East, The Kingdom, traded on wincingly offensive
stereotypes, while suggesting that the whole problem could be solved if good
ol’ American men and women simply shot every “towelhead” in sight.
