Boom, indeed! There is a lot of action in Hasbro’s movie, Battleship, but you have to sit through a painful thirty minutes before the action gets started and the fun begins.
When it comes to alien invasion and “the war of the worlds,” Wells and Spielberg knew that it’s crucial to get the aliens down to Earth and get the party started.
The big failing of Battleship is that it wastes time with unnecessary nonsense and terrible writing before the aliens are introduced. First, we get the year’s worst opening scene in which Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch of John Carter) tries to pick up a gorgeous blonde bombshell (Brooklyn Decker), dressed in tight white top, who inexplicably walks into a scuzzy bar and orders a chicken burrito. “I’m hungry,” she explains. No McDonald’s open? The ridiculous extremes to which Hopper goes to acquire said chicken burrito constitute the year’s worst scene.
This is followed by disgusting propaganda that turns physical therapy sessions for amputees in a VA hospital into a music video designed to advertise all the great things technology is doing for the American servicemen who have lost limbs in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Then, suddenly, the film leaps forward what must be years during which Alex Hopper’s upstanding Navy commander of a brother (Alexander Skarsgard) forces Alex to join the Navy in order get his act together. The next thing we know Alex is a lieutenant in charge of weapons firing aboard a Navy destroyer. From burrito thief to naval officer in a matter of seconds!
Unforgivable nonsense over, the alien ships splash down, Hong Kong gets pulverized by a crash-landing communications ship, and what follows is one of the best of the many alien invasion action movies released in the past few years. Unlike in the very boring The Avengers, the action is not a dizzying blur of motion. Instead of focusing on a wild confusion of flying things, we get simple duels between Navy destroyers and alien monster-craft. It’s always clear what’s going on; it’s never too fast to follow.
