Battleship (12A) **

Battleship (12A) **


Dir: Peter Berg


Starring: Liam Neeson, Taylor Kitsch, Rihanna


Synopsis: During the RIMPAC naval war games in Hawaii, a group of alien ships - attracted by a signal sent seven years earlier - splash lands in the sea and cuts off three destroyers and one of the Hawaiian islands from the rest of the world with a force field. The Race is then on to destroy the invaders and to stop them messaging their home world.


Verdict:  I was prepared for this film to be all 'HOORAH!' and macho soldier heroism - a triumph of special effects pornography over substance with a trailer that outmatched the final product. And I was pretty much bang on the money.

Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that I didn't like the special effects. They are good, but repetitive, and a bonus of this film is the fact that they chose not to do it in 3D. However, this redeeming feature doesn't detract from the fact that the film is, for all intents and purposes, a carbon copy of films like Battle L.A., Independence Day, all tied together with a dose of Transformers - even down to the  way the ships look, the sound effects, the music, and the plot (and being from the same company, it's hardly surprising).

It doesn't help that the plot is so samey that you could walk in halfway through the film and pretty much guess it with a high probability of accuracy, and that the script itself is littered with typically predictable one line quips that would make the worst offending of action heroes cringe. At least it realises this, and after one such line, a character is asked: "who talks like that?!"

But, this admission doesn't make amends for the amount of clichés that make up the back story, disappointing creature design, lack of originality, and the surprisingly long time it takes to approach the Battleship game that the film is supposed to be based upon.

The acting, thankfully, isn't awful, with Neeson's small amount of screen time made up of either speech-making or shouting angrily into a phone, and singer-turned-actress Rihanna's début being made up of the 'hoorah!' dialogue that was expected from the film.


Through all the recent alien invasion films, I can't help the feeling that Battleship is the latest offering from a Hollywood that seems to have been infiltrated by the military to produce a film that borders on propaganda and, somewhere, I am sure there is a journal or dissertation being written on that very subject.