Writing that feels more like the start of a confession than a review. And you can judge and condemn me, but trust me I've suffered enough.
So someone, somehow, thought it was a good idea to adapt this simple game of guessing coordinates of your opponent's ships into a movie. Their solution--turn it into an alien invasion movie. And yes, at one point (because the aliens are invisible to radar, sonar, anything) they create a grid from tsunami warning buoys to track them via water displacement, the closest they get to mimicking the original gameplay.
Now, when I heard they were making a BATTLESHIP movie, I joked that the weapons better be white pegs that turn red when they hit a ship. Well, they didn't do the white/red thing, but the weapons the aliens fire are shaped exactly like the pegs from the game. I'm not fucking kidding. This is how silly the movie is.
And I haven't even gotten into the characters. And for good reason. The hero is the smart but undisciplined guy who's dating the admiral's daughter. He has to team up with the Japanese captain whom he hates in order to save the world. And there are other ridiculously 'inspirational' cliches, like the guy who lost his legs and will to fight but perks up at the thought of saving the world. The only guy I really liked was the cowardly scientist, but they ruin him by giving him a heroic moment in the end.
Oh, and when they have no other ship so they recommission the U.S.S. Missouri ("Mighty Mo") but none of the current crop of sailors know how to run this antique so they get the original crew of WWII, Korean, and Vietnam veterans (those who attended the decommissioning) to help them man it. Cheesy as hell...but I gotta admit that kind of worked for me.
Okay, I've already written way too much about a movie that I could've waited and seen at Bad Movie Night next year.
Running Time: 131 minutes
My Total Minutes: 285,038
Good review Jason. It's pretty much just Transformers on water, and it's not even that fun. There were occasional moments where it seemed like this flick was getting somewhere, but then it just fell apart and decided to get louder and louder. My ears were pretty much ringing by the end of that and that never happens to me at places, except for maybe concerts.
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