I don’t know what I was expecting when I first heard that they were turning the classic children’s board game Battleship into a movie, but it certainly wasn’t an alien invasion yarn. Once that reveal happened, however, it didn’t take long to figure out what a Hasbro controlled movie about aliens fighting naval ships would look like, and—sure enough—Battleship exists as a pretty direct offspring of Independence Day and Pearl Harbor. It’s a dumb teenager of a movie that was never taught values by its dumb parents and has ended up falling in with the wrong crowd and dressing like Transformers.
If that sounds bad, it is. But the thing about Battleship is that it never goes from bad to awful. The acting (with the exception of Rihanna, who is horrible) all ranges from acceptable to decent. Peter Berg is a capable enough filmmaker, so the action scenarios are always shot and edited coherently, and there’s always a human element that keeps things from devolving into stretches of senseless noise like the worst of Michael Bay’s work. But the big hurdle the film can’t get over is that its script is uniformly terrible. Cheesy dialogue abounds. Too many characters and subplots are introduced, making a dumb movie about invading aliens far longer than it needs to be. No rules are set up concerning the alien’s capabilities, or limits placed on the humans’ improbable abilities to beat insurmountable odds with ridiculous, last ditch plans; so there fails to be any tension or stakes in the action. The script is so bad that the film manages the incredible magic trick of making absolutely no sense logistically while somehow also being the most formulaic summer blockbuster I’ve ever seen.
What’s so frustrating about all of this is that Peter Berg is, once again, a capable storyteller who could be making a much better movie. Battleship isn’t the case of a hack director making a laughably bad film; it’s an artist completely selling out, perhaps as thoroughly as anyone possibly can. This board game adaptation summer blockbuster copycat so shamelessly panders to the corporate filmmaking formula that it’s nearly nauseating. Every aspect of this film’s production was designed to make money, with no concern for artistry or storytelling thrown into the mix whatsoever. Ironically, that commitment to pandering to mainstream concerns results in a movie so bland and disposable that I can’t imagine even the most mindless and accepting moviegoers enjoying it. Hopefully their non-effort is given no financial rewards, forcing studios to go forward looking at more interesting projects in the future.
