Friday 13 April 2012

Battleship - Is It a Floater? By George Kleanthous

Directed by: Peter Berg
Written by: Eric Hoeber/ Jon Hoeber

Starting: Alexander Skarsgard, Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Brooklyn Decker, Rihanna

You may be aware of a little film which has hit the cinemas this week by the name of 'Battleship', based on the Hasbro board game in which you are pitted against your enemies fleet of ships and must guess where they are on your grid and sink them.

But Hasbro had better ideas, what's big at the moment? they ask, what has made us a ship-load of money once adapted onto the big screen? ALIENS! That's right, they turned it into a Sci-fi and banked off their incredibly successful 'Transformers' movies by duplicating it in nearly every way.

Based on the very real and most logical theory of alien visitation, 'Battleship' tells the story of an alien race responding to a message sent out by us and landing at the signal's birthplace, a satellite station in Hawaii, at the same time some of the world's best navy fleets join forces to run a navy battle exercise, which is rather convenient, as the aliens land they activate a barrier around the islands and effectively cutting off the majority of the fleets leaving three destroyers to battle them, you can guess the rest.

So far it might seem that I'm ripping on this film which I guess I am but it's really not that bad. It holds plenty of laughs, the effects are great and the action sequences are explosive, I just wish it wasn't a 'Transformers' clone.

It holds the same cinematography style as that of TF, the same sound engineers and cgi studio, Hell, they even have the same music composer in the way of Steve Jablonsky. So excuse me for feeling that the Hasbro execs weren't willing to try anything new.

All in all 'Battleship' holds it's own, it's not a bad film, in fact it's pretty darn good! People laughed, jaws dropped and Rihanna didn't have me wanting to jump ship as her acting wasn't the worst thing I'd seen. There were some particularly great moments in the film like the OAP montage (You'll see what I mean) and the use of real navy crewman and wounded soldiers was a kind and respectful nod at the armed forces. A tad bit on the lengthy side but still worth a watch!

Watch this if you liked 'Transformers' and 'Battle: Los Angeles'

3/5 stars

By George Kleanthous




1 comment:

  1. I like Taylor Kitsch, but I have no desire of see this movie. Even with the alines

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