RolloTomasi Review of Battleship

Battleship (2012)

This can be enjoyable if you don't take it seriously...at all. Not even a little.

[6/10 · 3 June 2012]

I saw this film even after it bombed on its opening weekend, and received the near universal scorn of critics and the general public. See, they showed a trailer for it before Wrath of the Titans (another one that landed with a thud) and I said, now come on that's a really great trailer. How bad can it be? There's got to be some value. I was curious to see how they tied it to the board game. And Peter Berg directed it. He typically does well with this kind of thing. So I dropped $5.50 for a matinée (not too bad) and saw it, having had nothing better to do at the time. I went into it though with an advantage that almost no one else had: Low Expectations. Yes, I believe those helped these proceedings out a lot. Sometimes when greatness is not expected, goodness can be found. I thought there were some good ideas in this, like the destroyer hiding in the cove and waiting for sunrise, then shooting the aliens' glass out to blind them. the following scene where the super cannonball takes the destroyer apart was nice. I liked the idea of the veterans getting one last call to "kick ass" on the old school battleship. Now, the ship was in the process of being decommissioned, right, so in theory there would still be weapons about. Uhhnnnn...all right well the whole thing is pure fantasy anyway. Cut it some slack. It's kind of a tribute to the old sci-fi movies, the ones that would have been bad even WITH great special effects. In marketing the film, they made the mistake of cutting these really great TV spots and theatrical trailers together that made you think you were about to see something great. But they also figured you'd still be thinking, how seriously should I take something that's based on a board game. They went to NO EFFORT to hide the fact that they'd built this film around a BOARD GAME. That should really have been your first clue. (Hey, they made a movie out of "Clue," too--and it flopped. I guess they'll never learn)