Battleship

By: Zach Goodier

Now, I went into this one asking myself, "How do you make a movie based on the board game with no story or characters whatsoever?" The answer is: you don't, at least, not well. What follows is a review of one of the biggest, most pointless, poorly done messes that I have ever seen. So why should you stay clear away from this steaming pile? Well, I'm happy you asked. Time to start my rant.

Oh boy.

Our terrible story starts with Alex Hopper, a grown man who still seems to enjoy sleeping on his brother Stone's couch and surfing bars, getting into fights to impress girls. Ok, not the worst start I've ever seen, but we're not done yet. In an ultimatum, Stone gives Alex an ultimatum to join the navy to get his act together. Fast forward, and the grown boy now is given a command position on-board a destroyer. In a joint exercise with the Japanese navy, Alex continues to cause nothing but trouble as he gets into scraps with one of the Japanese captains: Yugi Nagata. However, in the midst of the juvenile behavior, a mysterious series of objects crashes out of the sky, and soon Hopper finds himself placed in command of the entire ship after the senior officers are killed in the first assault. And much like the men under him, I was consumed with dread as you realize that this horrible, horrible person is now in command of a ship full of people.




The story is pretty half-assed, with the aliens apparently coming in response to a message we sent out to the cosmos. And obviously none of it has to do with the original game. Worse yet, they actually managed to get a decent actor to join the cast: Liam Neeson. However, he is barely included in the story, aside from being the father of Sam, the girl that Alex is involved with, so the entire purpose is just to create more cliche drama in an already boring movie.

The characters are all very limited, with the most "complex" being Alex, who really doesn't have anything more than a crush and the urge to be a delinquent. None of them have any depth at all, which means there's nothing in that department to watch either. So if there's no value to the story or characters, is this movie beyond any form of redeeming value?

Hopper decides to pick a fight with some aliens.

The action is where the movie starts to actually think about doing something right, with CGI ships looking decent, but these scenes are brief oases in a desert of bad acting, bad writing, and a terrible idea that should have never been allowed to become a movie.

Thankfully this movie provided a suitable face to use when describing it.

I really don't have much else to say about this film. It failed to create a semi-workable story, the characters were all terrible, with the possible exception of Nagata, who can be argued up to simply boring. The action is what this is all about, and the inclusion of Liam Neeson felt like a total waste of time and the casting budget. I didn't expect much from this movie, but it somehow managed to make my expectations feel absurdly high. In short, don't watch this if you value your time. This has managed to make a generally boring board game seem suddenly interesting, and if only for that alone, this movie has done the impossible.

Good:

-Did you even look at the review? Nothing. Zilch. Nadda.

Bad:

-Characters are all shallow, poorly written, and just terrible to watch, aside from one character, who just barely manages to be bearable.

-Story is a lame setup for aliens and battleships occasionally shooting at each other between boring dialogue and unnecessary side story.

-Manages to make a boring board game look thrilling.

Scully Rating: 1.0 out of 10