One Year Later
So, its been almost a full year since I made a conscious decision to stop watching war movies. A few recent events have caused me to re-examine the decision, and I figured More »
Battleship
I know. I said I wasn’t going to watchBattleship, even if hell itself dipped below the freezing mark and the porcine air force launched their first baconplane…. but I did. And, well, More »
The Monuments Men
The Monuments Men (in case you were living in a cave for the last several months) is a fictionalized re-telling of the story of the “Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives” division of More »
Battleship
I know. I said I wasn’t going to watchBattleship, even if hell itself dipped below the freezing mark and the porcine air force launched their first baconplane…. but I did. And, well, I probably shouldn’t have caved.
First, off, if you remove the obvious and overshadowing (and incredibly stupid) board game tie-in angle, turns out to be not a bad action-alien-robot-invasion movie. Not OMG-f*cking-awesome but not OMG-f*cking-terrible either. To arrive at this conclusion, you do have to shut off certain centers in your brain. Such as the “who the hell told Rhianna she could act” center. All I’m going to say there. There are enough explosions and yelling and weapons firing to satisfy even the most jaded of jaded action movie aficionados.
I can even work with the “loser joins the military and makes something of himself” angle that the main character, Lt. Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) went through. That’s a common and tried-and-true staple of character development, and Mr. Kitsch manages to work through the entire movie with it quite well, from the silly parts to the serious ones…. Really, I couldn’t fault him there.
But (you knew this was coming) for all its action movie “yeehaw” I just couldn’t keep this pill down. For starters, the whole board-game angle. I mean, come on, really guys? I almost had to leave the room when that whole scene came up. Not even joking. I don’t have words to describe what I thought of that.
Then, there’s the feeling I got that this felt way too much like a discarded story idea for one of the Transformers sequels. Not only that, but it looked and sounded like one too. The effects, especially those little yo-yo wheelie-bobber alien robot things, looked like they came straight off the floor of one of those design meetings. The sound effects ditto. At times even the score bore a striking resemblance. (Listen for it.) Also: What’s with the “jumping” spaceships. What? No, really, WHAT? What engineer, no matter what planet they came from, would sign off on THAT design? “OK, sure its inefficient as hell, and would create incredible destructive forces on the ship, but yeah, lets run with it! How else are we going to move on the Battleship game board?!”
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