Battleship

As twenty-four young citizens from the twelve districts of Panem travel to the Capitol to take part in the annual Hunger Games, aliens from outer space are travelling to planet Earth to play a few rounds of Battleship. Following in the plodding footsteps left behind by “Skyline,” “Battle: Los Angeles” and “The Darkest Hour,” “Battleship” is yet another alien invasion dud, but with one key difference: while the three other films I just listed were semi-original pieces of work, “Battleship” has the nigh-unseen honour of being based on a board game, and one which has no discernable narrative or reason for receiving the big-screen treatment, unlike murder-mystery game Cluedo, which got a cinematic adaptation in 1985 in the shape of comedy whodunit “Clue.”

You may have, at one time or another, played the Hasbro game upon which “Battleship” is based: if so, you should remember that it saw two players placing differently sized ships on a square-shaped grid unseen by the other player. Both players then had to blindly/strategically state coordinates for torpedoes to be fired onto their opponent’s grid, the objective of the game to sink all of the opponent’s ships, the victor being the first to do so. “You sunk my battleship!” is a common catchphrase associated with the game, although this is sadly not uttered at any point throughout “Battleship”’s runtime. It appears director Peter Berg (“Hancock”) has instead made the bizarre decision of replacing it with alien attackers, an attribute not typically associated with the game, unless my cousin David and I were playing it horrendously wrong.

The plot of “Battleship” is as such: in 2005, NASA discovers what is commonly referred to as a Goldilocks planet, i.e. a planet whose conditions for supporting life forms are “just right.” On the off chance that the planet (dubbed “Planet G") contains intelligent life, NASA sends a powerful signal in its direction which, in 2012, gets a response in the form of an unexpected visit, with five alien ships coming down from space and crashing into the middle of Hong Kong and the waters of Hawaii.

This coincides with RIMPAC, a multinational naval exercise taking place a few miles from the crash site in Hawaii. On the USS John Paul Jones is Lieutenant Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch, “John Carter”), an ill-disciplined ex-slacker who is trying (and failing) to straighten up and fly right after his brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård, “Melancholia”), who is commanding officer of the attending USS Sampson, ordered him to do so. Alex also wishes to marry physiotherapist Samantha (Brooklyn Decker, “Just Go With It”), daughter of the hard-nosed Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson, “The Grey”), but asking for her hand in marriage proves difficult when Shane gives him a dressing-down for a brawl on the vessel, and also when Alex discovers he will most likely be discharged come RIMPAC’s end.

But it seems that before RIMPAC gets to end, the world just may, as Alex discovers upon investigating a strange metallic vessel sitting in the middle of the ocean. Springing to life, the alien ship sends several torpedoes hurtling through the air, completely obliterating two of the human-boarded vessels and killing all of Alex’s superiors in the process, leaving him the one in charge. An impenetrable force field is promptly erected around Hawaii, leaving it up to Alex and his ragtag team of naval personnel (including pop star Rihanna in her acting debut) to defeat the extraterrestrial foes before they get to the NASA research facility and contact their buddies over on Planet G to tell them to come on down and take over the Earth.

There is a film that one must mention when one is reviewing “Battleship,” and that film is “Transformers.” Michael Bay’s 2007 sci-fi blockbuster, itself based on another Hasbro product (action figures, in that case), is very much imprinted in the DNA of “Battleship,” its spirit and influence looming in the foreground of practically every scene. Armed with a $200 million budget, Berg shoots “Battleship” with the same flashy, almost pornographic sensibilities Bay evoked whenever shooting the robot-thumping battles shared between the Decepticons and the Autobots in his film. Every shot in “Battleship" is a money-shot, whether it contains spinning razor-discs slicing through helicopter tails, a tumbling spaceship toppling over a Hong Kong skyscraper or Taylor Kitsch staring into a monitor, looking a bit worried (perhaps he’s thinking about his career).

But it’s not just in the shooting method and glossy special effects that “Battleship” recalls “Transformers.” Also like Bay’s film, “Battleship” is overlong, clocking in at just over two hours, which is about 30 minutes longer than it should be; at least fellow blockbuster “Wrath of the Titans” had the sense to finish quickly. There’s also quite a bit of completely inappropriate slapstick comedy, specifically in the first act, for example when we first meet Alex: he, in order to impress Samantha, whom he has known for all of 30 seconds, breaks into a convenience store to nab her a chicken burrito, clumsily wrecks the place, gets smothered in ketchup and is promptly tasered by armed police as he hands her the stolen food - all of this, I am not kidding, is set to the sound of the “Pink Panther” theme tune. I should also add that this burrito-stealing buffoon is the hero of the film.

The intergalactic foes, when they step outside the cosy confines of their seafaring spacecrafts, have much the same effect as the villains from “Battle: Los Angeles,” i.e. they’re boring. Humanoid creatures, they spend the entire film clad in “Halo"-style metallic space suits, and are antagonists whose motives and skill are both rather questionable: for one, what exactly is it they are trying to do? And two, why exactly are they taking so long to do it? It also doesn’t help that under their mechanical armor they look like a punch drunk Newton Faulkner, a fact which is stupidly revealed halfway through the film, sucking out any sense of threat they once had. Heck, the spinning razor-discs are far more menacing, and a lot more cool.

And “cool” is the word, Berg displaying an impressive panache for orchestrating an epic action set-piece or thirty, albeit clearly channeling Michael Bay and James Cameron all the while. And there is a certain entertainment value to be had in all of the explosive mayhem showcased in “Battleship,” but this proper sense of shameless, brainless fun manifests itself only in fits and starts. The film as a whole is a clunky and dumb “Independence Day” wannabe, with thinly developed characters conversing in cheeseball dialogue that one can only respond to with a roll of the eyes, and a third act that takes so long to get to that by the time we do get to it we’re bored and no longer give a hoot. More “Snore of the Worlds” than “War of the Worlds,” “Battleship” sinks, and sinks slowly.

4/10