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Frenetic Pony

Battleship, The BEST MOVIE EVER

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So I saw Battleship, sort of, for some reason.

This is the best example of the stupidest movie ever! Someone in Hollywood took every parody of every Michael Bay/Jingoistic crap movie ever made and made into an actual movie that wasn't trying to be a parody, it's friggen awesome!

The story is that Nasa finds another world that's like ours, and then builds something that looks like an Ion Cannon from C&C to "send a signal" there. The signal, of course, gets there faster than light, and a few years later some aliens show up and crash land on earth. Right in front of the dumbest motherfucker to ever live, and a terrible actor, who decides to win a girl he met in a bar by breaking into a 7/11, stealing a burrito, and then taking it to her as the cops try to arrest him by tazing him into submission.

Anyway, the aliens crash land in front of dumb jingoistic motherfucker's navy boat, which he's about to get kicked off of because he's a dumb motherfucker. He, being the main character, goes out and tries to see what it is in a tiny raft boat. Oh shit, it's aliens! That don't do anything, they just sit there. Put up a big forcefield around Hawaii (where they are) and then sit there. The navy, being that this is a terrible movie, decides to shoot a "warning shot" at the god damned alien spacecraft because why the fuck not.

The aliens return fire, on the sole gun that shot at them. It blows up, killing like a dude. And then they go back to sitting there. This requires dumb motherfucker to order his tiny boat to attack these gigantic, terrifying alien spacecraft with a machine gun. Dumb motherfucker's dumb fucking brother takes this opportunity to order his Navy Destroyer to also shoot at the aliens. Who return fire, AGAIN, blowing up the ship, AND ONLY THAT SHIP THAT FIRED ON THEM, while 2 other navy ships sit by it, completely unharmed and under no threat.

Now Dumb Motherfucker is even more angry. Not only do these aliens have the sheer nerve to be fucking aliens, a crime that warrants immediate execution all on its own, but now its personal! He gets back to his own destroyer and begins ordering everyone to start firing on these alien sonsubitches. And so it goes throughout the ENTIRE FUCKING MOVIE. The aliens, with their terribly inefficient weapons considering they can travel through interstellar distances with ease, get their asses kicked for having the impertinence to try and defend themselves from the humans, who are of course all dramatically played up as heroes everytime they murder the aliens in cold blood for showing up to our planet at all, despite the fact that we contacted them.

At the end of all this the bad old aliens are defeated, their plans to... try and make peaceful contact ended by the heroics of Dumb Motherfucker, who is of course treated like a hero for saving the earth from having to acknowledge intelligent alien life as anything other than something to immediately kill upon sight. I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not. The movie makes a very very specific point, again and again and again, that the aliens are only EVER defending themselves from Dumb Motherfucker and his fucking dumbass cohorts. They go out of their way again and again to avoid unnecessary casualties, never harm a fly unless fired upon, and are generally incredibly god damned patient with a race that's actively trying to murder them on sight just because. I felt like Leslie Nielsen would be showing up at any moment, revealing that the entire thing is an incredibly bizarre parody, but he never does. Would definitely recommend while recording a mock video for youtube while drunk with friends.

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oh... so that's what the movie is about.

When I saw it, the only thing that came to my mind was: "WTF did I just watch!?"

ps, you didn't even mention the alien balls with tails

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If any of you listen to the Quarter to Three movie podcast, this is one of Kelly Wand's best synopses. He has to pause regularly to insist that what he's saying isn't his stoned misinterpretation of onscreen action, it's actually what's explicitly happening.

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Didn't the aliens send out the whirring death balls to various cities? I got the impression they distinctly did make the first move, but it's been a few months and this movie's not a sticker.

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It really is amazing: the best movie I've seen in 2012*. It really is what you'd get if you took the core premise of Battleship to be essentially: that the other side is unknowable, and your attempts to communicate and combat often little more than shots in the dark. It's certainly the best treatment of first contact that I've seen in quite a long time, and Berg never really gives you a good reason to think the aliens are the aggressors. The trailers play up its similarity to Transformers, but I found it to be very different and very much better.

*Granted, all it's beat out so far is The Avengers, Prometheus, and Batman.

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Yeah, I actually liked Battleship; it could have actually recommend it if not for the 3 Michael Bay moments

of the amputee veteran taking on the Brute alien, the Old Men being asked to do "one more thang for their country" and the scientist coming back after deciding not to tag along

. I was also happilly surprised by the way they used the original licence and how they played out the US/Japan relationship. There were a few details here and there that were actually pretty well written.

I don't know... it's not a superior piece of entertainement, but it's not a bad movie either, and somehow, it felt more adventurous in what it tries to do than the Avengers.

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If the aliens actually don't initiate hostility, that would be an amazing twist that I didn't even notice in the cinema and that would give this movie actual legitimacy. But I'd have to see it again to check if it really is in there. Sorry for doubting, but I just find it so hard to believe.

Until that time, I found it an entertaining, dumb movie that had some funny winks to the original game (those landmines they use to check the position of the aliens), but that is also frustratingly stupid. I hated how they mangled the science in the beginning. All the shit at the beginning with yellow beam radio waves that travel faster than the speed of light, it destroyed the world for me. It was my flying snowman. I just couldn't get over it, and that was that.

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those landmines they use to check the position of the aliens

Those are actually deep ocean tsunami buoys . In real life, the network isn't at all as dense as what the movie suggest; but it's a really cool idea.

If the aliens actually don't initiate hostility, that would be an amazing twist that I didn't even notice in the cinema and that would give this movie actual legitimacy.

But I'd have to see it again to check if it really is in there. Sorry for doubting, but I just find it so hard to believe.

When the landing begins, it's made very clear that they are targeting infrastructure or elements that are a serious active threat: they don't fire at the ship not pointing at them and the brute alien doesn't attack the old guy from the machine room. It's sort of silly and doesn't really make any sense; but yes, the aliens do not fire first. From what I remember, the shield is raised; the alien ships respond to the US horn by a sound that makes the windows of the navy ships explode; then the US navy freaks out and start firing.

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When the landing begins, it's made very clear that they are targeting infrastructure or elements that are a serious active threat: they don't fire at the ship not pointing at them and the brute alien doesn't attack the old guy from the machine room. It's sort of silly and doesn't really make any sense; but yes, the aliens do not fire first. From what I remember, the shield is raised; the alien ships respond to the US horn by a sound that makes the windows of the navy ships explode; then the US navy freaks out and start firing.

This is 100% accurate and throughout the film, the aliens give every indication that they're just trying to contact home. It's this great subversion of Bay expectations because there's a big destruction scene, but only because their communications ship hits a satellite on the way in because we have so much space junk. So they've landed in the ocean, not knowing what to do, and their only goal throughout the film is call home and protect themselves while doing so.

Even that horn scene is great because it's this twisted callback to the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film is brilliant and I'm getting re-excited all over again. I pre-gamed it, but as I got more sober I started realizing that it was actually going to be a really good film and it was a thrilling experience to go through that emotional shift.

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Well, the intent greg describes is there; but it's covered by a decent layer of bad writing too (mostly on the character development side): it feels like the original direction barely survived through several 'beefing it up' iterations on the script by writers who didn't really get the original intent.

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God damnit I guess I need to see this dumb movie.

My thoughts exactly.

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Well, the intent greg describes is there; but it's covered by a decent layer of bad writing too (mostly on the character development side): it feels like the original direction barely survived through several 'beefing it up' iterations on the script by writers who didn't really get the original intent.

Yeah, the whole film is undeniably layered under pop film trappings—but it manages to undo a lot of your expectations about those trappings too. You'd expect Taylor Kitsch's character to come save Brooklyn Decker, but it never happens. One of the main characters also happens to be the most straightforward acknowledgement of the Iraq War in any film I've seen recently. The signal broadcast sequences are almost a parody what we expect to see out of NASA/film visualizations. The trailers way overplay how much Liam Neeson is actually in the film.

Vulture compiled every line Rihanna said in Battleship and it's pretty great.

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I will give this film another shot, but I stand by how irritated I was and am about how it completely screws up the science for no good reason. That's just dumb-dumb.

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Don't forget the fact that the hyper advanced aliens who can fly faster than light get defeated by a floating museum piece. Which somehow has a working engine, working guns and enough fuel and ammo to take them on.

I do like the fact that the bombs used by the aliens are shaped like the little pins you use in the game Battleship. And the scene where they are calling out grid numbers and shout out 'HIT' and 'MISS' without any trace of sarcasm or any kind of undertone.

[edi]t And that 7 11 burrito scene is (roughly) a frame by frame remake of this viral video:

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[edi]t And that 7 11 burrito scene is (roughly) a frame by frame remake of this viral video:

hahaha! Awesome!

I'm watching the movie right now and I don't see how the aliens are all peaceful-like.

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[edi]t And that 7 11 burrito scene is (roughly) a frame by frame remake of this viral video:

This was the biggest surprise to me while seeing it in theaters. I started wildly gesticulating and none of my friends knew why.

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I will give this film another shot, but I stand by how irritated I was and am about how it completely screws up the science for no good reason. That's just dumb-dumb.

Oh it's dumb, and bad, and terrible even. It's just such a goofy, schizoid, dumb and terrible movie that it ends up being funny in its own ways.

Like I'd totally forgotten about that viral video, and there really is a total recreation of that!

Oh, and one of the best parts is, one of the best parts is that the "heroic, climactic moment" of the movie is that dumbass motherfucker and the old guys have to stop the aliens from sending a message back to their planet. What's the message? Fuck if we know, probably "don't come to this planet of psychotic murdering things". But the point is, the aliens are trying to do something and have to be stopped. So the heroic struggle is a bunch of guys trying to move and old artillery shell to their old ship's guns. There's minutes of this stuff, heroic music blasting as these guys try to carry something heavy. Of course they get there, and shoot at the aliens.

This one shell then blows them the hell up, and the explosion, that's right, the explosion itself travels upwards like some sort of hungry beast thing, directly along these cable lines and only these cable lines to all these satellite dishes to blow them up too. The explosion is alive! And apparently intelligent. Either that or every single thing that sciency equipment was made out of is also incredibly, highly explosive, including the friggen satellite dishes, which were apparently made entirely of TNT or something.

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So the heroic struggle is a bunch of guys trying to move and old artillery shell to their old ship's guns. There's minutes of this stuff, heroic music blasting as these guys try to carry something heavy. Of course they get there, and shoot at the aliens.

Disregarding that it probably makes no sense in terms of naval warfare, that bit was actually coherent narratively: one of their cannons gets damaged and the crew needs to transport one huge shells from that part of the ship to where the usable twin cannon remains (this one having no ammo anymore). The structure of the ship was never meant to ease that operation, so of course they struggle and they are racing against time because they are entering the enemies firing range.

The movie isn't at all smart beyond what greg mentioned and yeah, the action part are very low brow; but I don't think the movie is nearly as dumb as what Frenetic Pony describes.

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Why didn't the army or air force or whoever else bomb those satellite dishes?

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Why didn't the army or air force or whoever else bomb those satellite dishes?

Because of the alien force field, obviously.

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Because of the alien force field, obviously.

Let me get this straight... The whole army of the USA, including land forces and air force and whatever there is was there for the navy excercise and was inside the force field?

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