MOVIE REVIEW: 'Battleship'

Movie review in the Friday, May 18 Oregonian....

Mainstream big-screen filmmaking is in a weird, risk-averse rut right now. As detailed in Mark Harris' 2011 GQ essay "The Day the Movies Died" and elsewhere, studios are now building their major releases almost exclusively around existing, easily recognized brands instead of original stories -- and it's led to a stunning lack of variety at your local cineplex.

As Harris points out, "brands" can be book series, theme-park rides, toys, or previous hits that can be sequelized, prequelized or remade. Sometimes, as in the case of "The Avengers," the brand is a comic book and the movie is executed beautifully.

But sometimes the brand turns out to be the Hasbro board game "Battleship" -- and it results in the dopiest, least-essential summer blockbuster since "Transformers 2."

Director Peter Berg ("The Rundown") takes a game about sticking pegs in a board full of plastic boats and re-imagines it as the story of military warships trying to fight off an alien invasion while trapped inside a force-field bubble that appears over Hawaii. The original board-game dynamics make a cameo in one scene where our heroes (commanded by Taylor Kitsch) try and figure out where the alien ships are on a gridded screen and shoot missiles at their best guesses.

There's almost nothing to "Battleship" beyond its grindingly dull, digitally rendered naval warfare; the flick could easily be retitled "Flying Ordnance and Forgettable Stars: The Motion Picture." Berg directs the film like he knows how silly and glandular and sub-Michael Bay it all is -- but even the winks don't excuse the sheer insulting amount of belief suspension he asks of the audience.

This is a movie where the aliens repeatedly and conveniently choose to hold their fire when they really shouldn't; where a decommissioned battleship can be instantly re-armed and staffed by elderly sailors who seemingly turn up by magic; where nearly every character is a doofus who makes bad decisions and speaks in rudimentary questions; and where mashing up imagery from a Hasbro board game, "Halo" and the Pearl Harbor attack seemed like a fine, tasteful idea.
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(131 min., rated PG-13) Grade: D-plus

'Battleship' (The Oregonian, Friday, May 18, 2012)

Comments

[Patricia]

"the flick could easily be retitled "Flying Ordnance and Forgettable Stars"

Haha. Thank you for confirming my reaction to it. I was fooled into watching it. Can't they make proper "popcorn" flicks anymore?