Battleship

Rating: **

Has there ever been a movie more likely to be doomed to creative folly? Not since producers at Disney ludicrously suggested that their theme park ride “Pirates of the Caribbean” would make a great basis for a film, has the twin demons of brand recognition and built-in fanbase been so egregiously exploited. Although I’m hardly comparing Battleship to Curse of the Black Pearl, both films yield some unexpected results. In this instance, the result is that Battleship, as pure popcorn entertainment, isn’t a complete waste of your time.

What’s interesting is that director Peter Berg is really working his butt off to channel Michael Bay, but naturally being Berg he can’t out-do the master. Nobody’s going to confuse Bay’s Transformers films with high art, nor will they with Berg’s Battleship for that matter. But in the case of the Battleship, I see a bizarre attempt to make something more than a by-the-numbers sci-fi action epic. In much the same way as Berg’s Hancock, a nearly post-modern take at Superman and the hero myth, it seems that half a good idea is better than no idea at all.

Still, we must confront the notion that this film is based on a board game, and I would say you can tell by the woodenness of the actors involved, but the actual game was made out of plastic. The somewhat pathetic excuse for an emotional through line involves Lieutenant Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), a man so gifted at the art of screwing up he’s about to be washed out of the navy despite having high aptitudes, an important position on his ship as chief weapons officer, and, as we learn later, he’s improbably one of the highest-ranking officers on his boat.

The entire set-up for the film is inane and predictable. Hopper is a malcontent, a rascal. He’s incorrigible and his older brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård), a navy captain with a bright and accomplished future, is always yelling at him to straighten up and fly right (as it were). Alex wants to marry Sam, but her father (Liam Neeson) is a powerful naval admiral who’s about as likely to give his approval as he is to confuse a destroyer with a submarine. Alex is a hot head that needs a lesson in humility, a rebel without a cause, a slacker looking for a reason… Naturally, he’s the only man that can save us when evil aliens come a calling.

But in all seriousness, if Berg had shaved the first hour and gotten right into the fighting, I think people might be more willing to give Battleship a pass. Nods to the game are incorporated in surprisingly inventive ways: the alien’s mortar fire resembles the game’s plastic pegs, and one of the key action scenes involves Hopper’s ship using tsunami warning buoys to form a grid pattern so that they can hunt the alien ships at night.

I also like how Berg has a genuine appreciate for military people in uniform beyond their being puppeteered for cool action sequences. One of the heroes is a veteran, a double amputee whose physiotherapist is Sam, and the film’s climax – without getting into spoilers- involves World War II vets fighting alongside the young pups to deal the aliens a final, crushing blow. The whole movie thinks that it’s going to break out of its cocoon of mediocrity to become something rather unique, but for whatever reason it just can’t seem to get there.

But for all the innovation Berg attempts to bring to the story, the film is horribly anchored (pun intended) by the usual action movie tropes like the arrogant man-child hero, the doting girlfriend, the loyal best friend, and the terse but well-meaning mentor figure. The motivation of the aliens is never explained, which is a mixed blessing, but then again the whole plot is centred around aliens parking their small fleet off shore near Hawaii so that they can access a satellite array to call in their larger armada. “Sure, we can span the universe in our powerful ships, but can we borrow your phone?”

But for better or for worse, the movie will be judged by the fact that it’s based on a board game, and unlike that previously referenced Pirate movie, the end result does nothing to make the audience believe that the people behind it care. When they talk about bland studio product, Battleship is the next best example, and it’s all the more frustrating given what Berg & Co. seem to want to do with the damn thing. Hopefully the movies based on Ouija and Monopoly will bear sweeter fruit.

Battle: Los Angeles

Rating: ***

The alien invasion genre has been enjoying a resurgence lately. There was last fall’s SKYLINE, this coming summer’s COWBOYS & ALIENS, and the highly-anticipated TV drama FALLING SKIES. But for now we have BATTLE: LOS ANGELES, a film that could euphemistically be called BLACK HAWK DOWN with flying saucers. Actually, it’s a fairly apt description, though a tad ambitious given everything. Still, for a satisfying, gritty, urban warfare epic, BATTLE: LOS ANGELES is actually very satisfying.

The set-up is simple: aliens arrive off the coastal areas all around the planet and their intentions are immediately identified as hostile. Wave after wave of Marines are being sent in to combat the aliens’ ground assault (fortunately, for some strange reason, they have no air support…yet). One squad of Marines, led by a green lieutenant, are dispatched to help recover civilians from the war zone before the Air Force begins their bombardment. Naturally, complications occur, and the squad is left to the command of Sergeant Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart), who’s close to retirement and haunted by some nondescript war drama.

The film is solid in setting up the battle, and doesn’t try and bog the thing down with some unnecessary melodrama, or over-complicating the aliens and their reasons for descending on planet Earth. SKYLINE failed epically because the motivations of the aliens are unclear, and their motivations weird and terrifying. Combined with the fact that all the human characters in that movie, including TV’s Eric Balfour(!), were beneath contempt and what was left was a movie neither compelling or particularly engaging.

The urban warfare perspective serves BATTLE: LA better as opposed to the SKYLINE’s whiny condo dwellers approach. The action is well-directed if not inspired, but director Jonathan Liebesman wisely shirks the idea of going full handheld with the action, but still manages to level a touch of realism to how the film is made. In other words, this isn’t pseudo-war documentary, or rather what some people think the way a war documentary should look. The action is fairly solid, and, admittedly, it’s gratifying to see an alien invasion movie that doesn’t try for one minute to be STAR WARS redux. (INDEPENDENCE DAY, I’m looking at you.)

But let’s rewind for a moment, and revisit the alien’s motivation. Apparently, they’ve come to our world looking for water, which seems to be how they power their ships, and hey, they just love the stuff, I guess. (I wonder if they’ve ever warred against the aliens from SIGNS?) Set aside the fact that water is one of the most common compounds in the universe (we seem to find it everywhere, even in our own solar system), and its base components – hydrogen and oxygen – are two of the most basic elements in the universe, the aliens still had to come to Earth to find water?

Setting aside that they can travel hundreds of light years across the universe but can’t smash some hydrogen and oxygen together to get water, why do invading aliens even need motivation? It’s been a while since I’ve read WAR OF THE WORLDS, but I don’t remember the passage where the unnamed protagonist gets the expository behind the invasion. Maybe aliens can be dicks. Maybe they don’t like our faces. To me, no motivation, articulated or supposed, is better than a stupid one like they hate us for our water.

But back to the movie, which as I said, is perfectly serviceable and actually rather enjoyable. You are kind of sad to see the soldiers dispatched when their time comes, and Eckhart is truly effective as the sergeant that keeps the unit together despite everything. BATTLE: LA is lo-fi, effective popcorn action with a little bit of sprinkled melodrama for seasoning. It’s a satisfying effort all around, even if it doesn’t reinvent the wheel in the process. Or is that saucer?

Skyline

Rating: *1/2

Obviously, alien invasion movies are works of fantasy, so by their nature they are somewhat unbelievable and require a suspension of disbelief. SKYLINE, however, requires a frontal lobotomy. There isn’t a single character in this film that I was invested in, the visual effects were less than stunning, the story was strained and the entire concept seemed tired and clichéd. By the time the film is over, I had no idea what the point was, who the story serviced or what I was supposed to get out of it. And sadly, I don’t think I can blame it all on actor Eric Balfour either.

Balfour plays Jarrod, who arrives in L.A. with his long-time girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson) for a few days of chilling out with his buddy Terry (Donald Faison) in his overly technical and extravagant downtown L.A. pad. In the wee, small hours the next day, a blue light falls at several points in the city and if you stare into it too long, you become so mesmerized that you barely notice it when you’re sucked up into a giant spaceship. After the initial vacuum effect, the aliens start going house to house to find human stragglers, like Jarrod, Elaine, Terry and a few other hung-over party survivors.

Aside from the aliens, the human drama centres on Jarrod and Elaine trying to cope with the fact of Elaine’s just revealed pregnancy and all the “life-changing” dilemmas that go along with that. Not helping is Terry trying to get Jarrod to drop everything back wherever he’s from and moving to L.A… Land of milk and honey. Land of the endless party. And land where you’re assistant will gladly follow you into the shower for several minutes of heavy breathing under the nose of your live-in girlfriend.

Here that everyone? Terry’s a jerk! And if you need any more proof, the first thing he does when aliens are revealed to be on the loose is grab a gun. Meanwhile, Jarrod’s does the typical square white guy freak out at the sight of a gun. (Doesn’t he live in the United States?) Elaine becomes the typical girlfriend in peril, meaning that nothing Jarrod suggests is even remotely convincing to her. Granted, in this instance, Jarrod’s plan to make a run for it to the marina and take off into the ocean because there are no alien ships over the ocean, was idiotic. Clearly, Jarrod thought this was SIGNS and that the aliens were afraid of water, not that he was in SKYLINE and that the aliens were focused on cities because they were vacuuming up people, and there are no people on the ocean!!!

Speaking of residual presence of alien invasion movies past, it’s hard not to get a derivative stink off of SKYLINE. You like people hunkered down in a single, enclosed setting (SIGNS)? You like giant alien ships hovering about a major American city (INDEPENDENCE DAY)? You like looks inside the goop filled recesses of alien technology where machinery is biology (ALIENS, WAR OF THE WORLDS, THE THING)? Then you’re going to love SKYLINE. Except you probably won’t. The characters are lame, and the glimpses inside the aliens’ world looks like something out of a video game, and that video game is Bioshock.

I’m going to do some spoilers a bit here because to get a full taste of the insaneness and idiocracy of the film, you need to know how it turns. Ready? Still here? Okay…

So we learn near the end that the aliens are collecting humans in order to take their brains by yanking them right out of the skull, cast away the other 95 per cent of the human body and putting those brains inside the alien machines to make them run. Come to think of it, you never actually see the aliens themselves, just the organic suits and other war machines that run on human brains. Which begs the question: how did these machines run before they ran on human brains? It’s like Underworld all over again; how did the werewolves kill the vampires before they discovered sunlight bullets? If you can answer any of this, you’re smarter than me. And the screenwriters.

Anyway, we learn all this when Jarrod and Elaine are sucked up into one of the ships. Jarrod gets the brain removal treatment while Elaine is taken away to some icky alien maternity ward where the newborn is ripped out of the new mother’s womb (presumably when the baby’s mature enough to be delivered). This begs another question: what are the aliens going to use the babies for? Why separate the mothers from everyone else? Simple logic like this needs resolution. But before you get too deep into it, the alien stormtrooper who received the brain of Jarrod starts blasting away at the other aliens seemingly in order to save Elaine. So Jarrod was the only human whose love for his loved one was so strong it overcame the alien tech to do his brain’s bidding? Unlikely, but there’s no time to explore this because it’s where the movie ends.

But this is what happens when you get visual effects guys to write a script; the human characters are bland and the alien technology and creatures is meticulous in its detail. And the only really original part of the script is never explored because it happens in the end, where the real movie should have began. SKYLINE had promise, much like the last movie by Colin and Greg Strause, ALIEN VS PREDATOR: REQUIEM, but the whole enterprise sinks under an undeveloped script. When you’re rooting for the aliens to win, you know you’re in trouble. Actually, nobody wins in this.