What the-- I'm breaking my blogging dry spell for Battleship?!? Why on earth would I do that when there's been so much other good stuff to talk about?!?
Well, because poor little Battleship needs a little love. Sure, I could rave about how much I liked The Avengers, but everyone's doing that. And while I can't honestly say I loved Battleship, it's not the utter drek everyone's treating it as.
Yes, there are some parts that made me want to groan. When the radar went out so they came up with a tracking grid, and started calling out their attacks ("Echo One-One! Foxtrot Seven!" "It's a miss!") I just thought to myself, I can't believe they actually went there. And the alien missiles actually looking like pegs as they smashed into the ships just made me groan inside as well... and I tried really really hard to overlook that, because the missile launchers revving up to fire them looked so cool. And lastly, the Hasbro logo coming up as a movie studio logo at the beginning of the film made me actually laugh out loud. I recognized the logo as soon as it started, because it's on my Japanese Collection Transformers DVDs (something else I hope to review someday). On the DVDs it makes sense-- a DVD is a consumer product, so I can understand Hasbro putting their stamp on their product. But putting it right after the Universal logo makes me feel like Hasbro is trying to say, "Look, we're a real film studio!" Now that takes some serious pegs.
But the thing is, those are all small parts of the movie. I went into this movie with the attitude that this was no different than Cowboys & Aliens, it's just Navy & Aliens. And I like me some good military-vs-aliens shoot-em-ups. And in that sense, this movie delivers-- there's lots of great hardware, both human and alien. And the scenes of the USS Missouri launching and joining the battle, with those great big guns swiveling and blasting away, warms my Yamato-lovin' heart. Very good eye candy, very exciting battle scenes. And they worked in a believable reason for why there's a Japanese Destroyer in the fleet. And having the veterans come back aboard to run the Missouri with the younger generation worked great for me as well... I just loved seeing these octogenarian soldiers kicking butt.
And there's a lot of cool little in-joke homages to other science fiction, including Star Trek, Star Wars and X-Files. They're all subtle enough to make me smile and not so over-the-top to make me feel like they were trying too hard. (I would have even dismissed the Star Wars one as coincidence if it hadn't been the third one I caught.)
So that's what, three things I didn't like and five that I did? So it comes out two points ahead.
Battleship is by no means a great movie, but it's good enough. Heaven knows I've sat through much, much worse.
