If you're even the least bit familiar with me or my blog, you know how much I love playing Devil's advocate. I mean, I'm the one guy who loved Wrath of the Titans for crying out loud! The reason I did, is because no matter how bewilderingly incomprehensible the characters motivations or buffoonish the plot machinations, it managed to transport me into its silly world and inspire a little awe without being painfully offensive. So it is with little surprise, but great disgust, that I report of Battleship's complete failure to win me over, even on the diminished level I thought it capable. The coked up, hypocritical nonsense Peter "Irish Terry Conklin" Berg spewed at a befuddled Israeli reporter recently is a pretty clear indication of what you're getting into when you sit down to watch this glossy pile of disingenuous garbage. Battleship is the ugly cynicism of the Transformers franchise taken to its most logical and dispiriting conclusion.
Now, I can accept cinema being used from time to time as a platform to advance a jingoistic agenda so long as it is done competently and has the decency to honestly mean what it espouses. Battleship however is a scattered smattering of lip service so disinterested in focusing on what makes military men heroes, it sidelines its only truly heroic character for the bulk of the film, but more on that later. Which brings us to its first problem, the lead character. Taylor Kitsch plays another in a long line of infuriating Hollywood mavericks whose selfish bullshit ruins everybody's lives around them. This guy spends the entire film making one wrong decision after another, never has to face one iota of adversity, yet still gets everything he ever wanted in the end thanks to looking good in a uniform. The only smart thing he does the whole film is hand the ship over to Asano Tadonobu (a great, charismatic Japanese actor utterly wasted here).
So, once again we have the forwarding of this frustratingly anachronistic idealism so prevalent in American cinema. The man of action, the rebellious fool is who we should idolize, yet only within the confines of an armed forces hierarchy in which this directionless losers antics wouldn't be tolerated for one second. Hell, he would never have been admitted into the Navy after the shit he pulls in the first scene. Though I suppose there would be no mark on his record since after breaking and entering, destruction of private property and resisting arrest, the Honolulu P.D. apparently just let his brother take him home to sleep it off in a bathtub full of ice cubes. Also fleshing out his character is my most hated of all lazy scriptwriter hackery: quoting famous literary sources. Nothing tells me you and the character you wrote is smart as much as simply putting the words of other, better writers in their mouth. Thankfully I had already emptied my king sized soda by the time they got around to riffing on Sun Tzu's The Art of War as I required a receptacle to violently retch into.
The one bright spot of the film, the one chance it had to impart anything of relevance whatsoever, was in the character of Mick Canales. Portrayed by Colonel Gregory D. Gadson, a bilateral, above-the-knee amputee, occasional actor and motivational speaker who has served our Country all over the world for over 20 years (thanks wikipedia), Canales is the only character with meaning. He's the only actual hero who has sacrificed anything. He's also the only character facing any sort of adversity, apart from Kitsch being understandably recalcitrant to ask Liam "you've got me for two days" Neeson for his daughter's hand in marriage. We are introduced to him in a rehab facility, struggling to physically and psychologically come to terms with the man he has become. I was instantly interested and wanted to know how this mans story would play out. Unfortunately, the focus shifts back to the deadly dull CGI pyrotechnics for the bulk of the remainder, only occasionally checking into this subplot that should have been the films primary focus.
Instead, we get a lot of repetitive explosions and twirling, clanking blurs. I was excited to see what the rendering crews were going to come up with, having read an article wherein Berg mentioned being afforded ungodly sums of excess budget thanks to Universals recent merger and their dedication to wow the foreign markets with spectacle over story. Alas, it all looks the same, and not very good at that. Everything is either dripping water or spewing smoke and fire, so the pedestrian design work isn't given its moment in the sun. Each set piece is unforgivably obscured and edited together in headache inducing fashion. The aliens themselves are just hands and eyes in a space suit, ill defined and completely fake. Never once does anything feel real or have any impact. I couldn't wait for the "spectacle" to be done having its way with me.
I'll be shocked if I see a worse film this year. This is the absolute nadir of commercial film making. Battleship is what people are referring to when they complain about blockbuster films and our way of life. It is capitalism at its most base and loathsome, a ragged thief wrapped up in the American flag. Avoid at all costs.
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