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Film: Battleship

Country: USA

Year of Release: 2012

Director: Peter Berg

Screenwriters: Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber

Starring: Alexander Skarsgård, Brooklyn Decker and Liam Neeson

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Anyone who’s ever played the strategy board game Battleship might, on hearing that there’s a movie version, wonder how it would convert dramatically. For those not versed in the game – and I’ve only played it a couple of times myself – it’s basically a more complex version of the windows desktop game Minesweeper, played on a grid and based on simple logic, and really not in any way spectacularly exciting. It seems that the producers of the film arrived at the same conclusion, and found a simple answer to the question of how to add some fizz. Throw in some aliens, and let them resemble giant Transformers who are intent on taking over the world. The fact that toy company Hasbro, which owns the Transformers franchise also owns the rights to the Battleship game has much to do with the film’s existence.

So far, so ludicrous. Which is fine if that’s what you’re after. Having watched the trailer the week before, I knew all of this before I entered the cinema, genuinely in the mood for watching a big over-the-top save-the-planet Hollywood blockbuster. But the sad news is that all of these extra fireball-spouting additions from outer space do little to make the film much more exciting than the board game.

The plot, for what it’s worth, involves an armada of alien spaceships that have been sent to earth on a reconnaissance mission that involves more than a little death and destruction. They happen to land in the same broad area of ocean where a large-scale international naval exercise is taking place, in which the film’s hero, a talented ne’er-do-well named Hopper (Brooklyn Decker) is participating. When Hopper investigates the huge, unidentified structure, he is thrown into the air and suddenly a huge force field surrounds the area around the alien ship. With Hopper’s naval destroyer the only surviving vessel on the inside of the force field, it’s up to our hero to save the planet.

All of this should be at least vaguely exhilarating but simply isn’t. We’ve seen it all before dozens of time and Battleship does little to make any of it seem even remotely fresh or new. More significantly, it is a film that is empty at the centre, and entirely unconvincing, even on its own terms. The film has no tension, partly because it’s so hard to care about the outcome and partly because that outcome is so generic and utterly inevitable. Lots of destruction, humanity gets to live another day and our hero redeems himself through his actions. Whoopa dee doo da!  Of course the same set of inevitabilities can produce a film like The Day After Tomorrow – still fundamentally stupid and high on the ludicrous meter – but engaging and beautifully produced. That’s not the case here.