There’s a lesson to be learned from “Battleship”, the new big-budget actioner screening across Pakistani multiplexes. Never contact aliens without stocking up on, big, alien-busting guns.
A handful of trapped navy men with battered, limited, resources, take down invading aliens in “Battleship”. Yes, no need to say this. I know. It’s that kind of a movie where the lead, an arrogant incautious loudmouth – already in hot-water – is put in-charge by fate as humanity’s last hope.
The man of the hour is Taylor Kitsch (playing Alex Hopper), who, in his second event movie in this pre-summer lineup, improves on the vacant expressions he ported over from “John Carter”.
Kitsch is a perfect fit on paper. When we first see him, he’s a wayward 20-something without a 5-year plan, who immediately falls for the Admiral’s daughter (Brooklyn Decker playing Samantha Shane). Her wooing — he gets her a burrito by breaking into a 7-Eleven getting tasered by the police in the process – is perhaps the best comic relief in the movie. He isn’t better years later, when his brother has forced him into the Navy.
“Battleship” is a constantly revved-up engine that takes a substantial amount of time setting up its characters. One-dimensional, though they may be; apart from Mr. Kitsch’s Hopper, we pick up specs of backstories from supporting players between conversations. However, there’s no time to fit more of that in, because the screenplay goes all gung-ho from the mid-point after the ET’s colossal ships, and their angry red “auto-roller balls of fury” tear up the coastline.
Somewhere, within this blitzkrieg, I felt an admiration for the screenplay’s resourcefulness in adaptability. Working from the minimalist idea of Hasbro’s board game, the film stuffs its one-line plot chock-full of elements, which although sidetracking and a tad stretchy, are engaging enough to clutch interest.
Think of “Battleship” as Transformers Jr., without the hulked-up talking robots. It is big, loud, a bit insecure, somewhat overlong, and lots of fun – at least if you’re into gargantuan, technologically advanced alien ships taking down the planet; and it’s not meant for the smaller screens.
The plot begins in 2005 where enthusiastic NASA people send out an intergalactic “hello” via a new-tech satellite array to a far-flung extra-solar planet. Obviously, like all movie scientists, they do not heed Stephen Hawking’s theory about superior ET’s and their scavenger-like stance on us humans. The aliens do not call back. Instead they send out a welcoming committee of five souped-up ships that splash nearHawaiiand barricade themselves in an impenetrable force-field.
Caught within the barricade are Alex, the film’s immediate supporting cast (Alexander Skarsgård, Rihanna, Asano Tadanobu, and Liam Neeson on the other side), three Navy Destroyers and the retired USS Missouri (the Battleship of the title). The ships, by wayward luck found in sci-fi movies, were a part of RIMPAC (an international biennial joint-Navy exercise), so they’re armed for ET-thrashing.
Need I say more? Didn’t think so.
