Well, that was a waste . .

     I've been pretty busy with real life activities and a new job, but decided to watch Battleship instead of doing a little casual mining and listening to audio books of Steven King's The Dark Tower.  Well, that's a couple hours I'll never get back.

     The premise that the movie is somehow vaguely related to the classic Battleship board game, is a complete dis-service to the board game.  Aside from a couple minutes where a fancy little oceanographic buoy grid is clumsily used by the cast to supposedly target and shoot the bad guys, the movie has about 99% NOTHING to do with the game.  The "battleship" part is merely because they drag out a museum ship, sitting for two decades, to try to deal with a bunch of alien bad-guy invaders, who turn all the modern ships into so much flaming wreckage.  A battleship, it is hoped and theorized, has the size and mass to absorb damage from alien chainsaw balls, and their funky armour piercing depth charges, and will hopefully allow the intrepid crew the time to save the planet.  LUCKILY, the mothballed ship just happens to start right up after 20 years of sitting, PLUS, they just happen to luckily have a bunch of 1000 lb HE shells laying around (in a ship that is a museum and tourist attraction . . ok), PLUS, they just happen to also have a bunch of 100 lb charge bags of super high explosives laying around so they can fire said 1000 lb shells, and finally, they have a handful of old, busted ass, retiree vets who used to serve on the ship and they are able to get the ship limping out to do battle with a few people when it took scores to hundreds of seamen to just drive the thing around the bay once.  That's ok, it's just a movie though.  The very BEST part?  Well, after the nasty water aliens were clever enough to blow up all the gun turrets where their ammo was, 5 or six people, half of them being the previously mentioned old and busted up vets, decide to CARRY, by hand, one of the 16" diameter, 1000 pound rounds a few hundred feet to the back of the ship, THROUGH the middle of the ship, UP stairs, DOWN stairs, the whole shebang. Wow.

     Now, when I watch a movie, I'm just watching a movie.  I don't care about plot or character development, or what the movie or director is trying to say.  It's just entertainment.  this movie though, was busted, disjointed and clumsy.  Like a low budget, water version of Independence Day.  All the hard core rah-rah-USA movies tend to make me dry heave, but ID was a very enjoyable movie.  It flowed well.  Battlefield flowed like a frozen turd on 60 grit sandpaper.  The dude from John Carter was in it, as the main anti-hero dude, and I enjoyed John Carter (even though I've never read any of the books in the series), and his rebel character wasn't too terrible.  They had a hot blond chick - so the guys have something to watch.  I think Rihanna's agent must have paid the movie to let her be in it, and it looks like her part was added as an after thought seeing as how maybe the movie makers started to smell that the movie was a stinker, so let someone with some wide PR exposure join the cast in the hopes that people would be ignoring the film and only pay attention when Rihanna was on screen.  It also looked like the writers came up with the dialogue for her part on a 15 minute coffee break.  Brutal and had no connection to what was going on in the movie.  If Rihanna's part had been deleted, it would have changed essentially nothing.  Not that Rihanna was terrible, I bet she'd be a decent actress, but her "part" in that movie was brutal, like many of the parts.  I have NO idea what the fuck Liam Neeson was doing in that movie though.  I can't remember one of his movies that I didn't enjoy at least mildly.  Is he that hard up for work or parts?  Let's not forget the angry double amputee vet too.  I guess for peak USA sales, a smart director will try to roll in the whole "vet thing" at least once in a movie to get the whole flag thing roiling.  Oh look, a double amputee vet kicking advanced alien ass!  Yay!

     With me being the admittedly unimaginative and un-artistic guy that I am, when I can predict line after line in a movie, it's a stinker.  Cool CGI effects with the alien ships, 'n stuff, but it's a busted ass movie.  It MIGHT be worth a watch, later after it comes out on DVD, if someone accidentally leaves it at your place.  Other than that, I could have mined a decent amount of ore to over-price after HA5.  It's been a decent while since I sat through a stinker like Battleship.  That one made it past the filter somehow - I shall have to be more vigilant.