Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) spent most of his life not trying, even after his Brother John (Alexander Skarsgard) forces him to join the Navy. But during a major naval war games event, which was to be his final mission, an Alien race invades and seals off the islands of hawaii, and wipes out any military within their forcefield. Now Hopper, along with his crew of a single destroyer vessel, have to put a stop to the alien threat, before the whole of earth can be destroyed.
Don't expect much from this film, because it doesn't offer anything. Honestly Battleship is probably the biggest example of a 'background noise' film I have ever seen. For starters, the concept is taken from the old battleship board game. Not sure what version of the game the film makers played as children, but I remember it a little differently. There is one small reference to the game in the story, and despite being the most interesting scene, it is very brief and pretty bizarre.
The rest of the film doesn't offer much else either in terms of entertainment. The story stinks of 'yay america' concepts: whether it is paraplegic soldiers fighting hulking aliens, retired veterans repairing an old battleship, or a Japanese ship being obliterated. The editing and special effects are all far over the top, and look as though they were copied straight out of transformers (I'm pretty certain i even heard the transformer sound to boot). Despite the cast being dotted with big faces (Liam Neeson for starters) most of them are ignored or given bit parts. The core cast revolves around Rihanna being a token black soldier woman, a Japanese man who is there for comic relief, and Kitsch playing John Carter all over again. Some of the action and battle scenes are interesting, but they are eclipsed or made ludicrous by everything else that's wrong with this film.
It isn't hard to guess why Battleship may have sunk at the box office.
