#32 - Talkin' Battleship (Page 2 of 3)

I think a better example is Chronicle. It's a wholly original idea with no-name stars, a no-name director, and a writer with...well, half a name, we'll say. And that was a breakout mainstream success.

There are so few major movie releases coming out this year that aren't based on existing material. The next major one is Brave, but that has the Pixar brand so even it doesn't really count.

To break from this topic a little, I'd just like to apply the comment about laziness in alien design to the whole movie. Everything was copy-pasted from something else. The alien suits were from Halo, that scene is from Jurassic Park, this console is from Half-Life. Talk about unoriginal, this is literally a movie that is assembled from bits of other properties whole-cloth! It sounds so familiar, it's almost like...

...oh my god.

That. All of that. FUCK. YES.

I just watched Battleship...

I feel that I must preface this post with a bit context so that I don't sound like I'm completely retarded. Maybe it will make me sound even more retarded. I dunno.

I like bad movies. Most people would say that my love of bad movies is ironic, but I disagree. I find them often to be entertaining so long as they are aware of what they are. The Asylum movies are fun to watch because the people making them know they're making a movie called Megashark vs Giant Octopus. Micheal Bay, however, had no idea while making the Transformers movies that he was making that sort of movie. The Transformers films are Asylum films with big budgets, but without the self awareness. It's not just that the Transformers movies are utterly incoherent most of the time. Most B-Movies have plots that make no god damn sense.

The Room and Birdemic are shitty B-Movie versions of Transformers. Megashark is, in my opinion, a shitty B-Movie version of Battleship. The Room is a movie that you can learn to love in an ironic way. You guys were talking about a kid clopping around in his father's shoes acting stupid. It's adorable and you can't really hate it. I think a better analogy is when a kid is doing something that you're not really supposed to do. When a kid's at a restaurant and eating with his hands and has a face covered in spaghetti sauce, it's cute so long as the kid is young enough. If you're 40 and you're eating it like that you're going to be offending a lot of people and putting them off their appetite. That's the difference between The Room and Transformers. It's OK for the room to be a mess, cause the people making it don't know any better. The people making Transformers SHOULD know better, and DO know better, but they're acting like dumb kids with the immature humor and the really stupid plot and the pointless action scenes, etc.

When it comes to Megashark and Battleship, I guess you'd have to liken it more to... I dunno... Playing the piano, maybe. You've got really awesome action movies like The Avengers at one end that do a great job of playing a fucking awesome version of Hungarian Rhapsody No2 that sounds like this:

And then you've got Megashark doing it, and it's not as good and it's off tempo and there are missed notes and it's just not as well performed, but it's still HR No2. With Megashark, the movie is still fun and watchable on purpose. They know they can't make the effects look good, so they just push the scenario to the extreme to compensate. No budget or time for that shark effect? Well then have it jump to take out a 747 from 20,000 feet. Then not only does the effect look like crap, but there's no way in hell you could have possibly made it look good.

Finally you've got Battleship. When they play the song it's also not the best performance. In fact, the song isn't even the point of the performance.

For movies like Battleship, the performance is the goal. They're saying "yeah, this whole thing is ridiculous", but they've got the budget to make the effects look really good. Just like that shark, tho, no matter how good you get them to look, the concept is so far out there that it doesn't matter, and they totally know it. Imagine you're Peter Berg and you just got handed a lot of money to make a movie based on a board game, and then they hand you THAT script. There's no way in hell you think "now how can I make this a good movie?" You think "How can I make this as fun as possible to watch?" Personally, I think he made a number of pretty good decisions for this flick, and there's not much in the way of insultingly bad shit. There were only a few times where I gave the film negative points, and most of them were handed out in the first twenty minutes. The first scene is pure exposition. The very next scene is one of the worst 'as you know' scenes I've ever seen in a movie. "As you know, we are brothers and it is your birthday and you have no job, car or money".

Further, they pretty much pay off everything. This is pretty close to a 'perfect' movie, guys. They don't pay off the soccer game, aside from the fact that he's a douche who makes bad decisions at the beginning of the movie. The fact that these guys play soccer doesn't come back up. THAT IS ALL I can think of. Maybe I should watch it again...

They do pay off the freeway overpass killing scene, tho not the fact that they killed the freeway. They actually pay off a lot more than I was expecting. It's not the payoffs that suck, really, it's the setups, because at the time they set them up they seem utterly crazy, and the thing you think is important actually isn't. They're not setting up the fact that they're attacking infrastructure or anything. They're simply setting up the little death balls so that later when they get launched at the ship, you're aware of the threat they pose to the ship.

The cops tell the girl and the amputee to get off the mountain, right...  then they just leave them there instead of taking them along, and they leave the jeep to block the road. At the time I was like "WTF!? You left them there? You left the jeep? What the fuck kind of asshole cops are you?" And then they die, and that actually made me happy. And then the girl and the amputee get the keys from the dead cops, have a tense scene with Bippo the ADHD alien who gets distracted by random wildlife, and go back to the jeep to call for help. Everything in that previous scene mattered, but none of it made any god damn sense while they set it up for that. There's so much other stuff that's operating at that level of batshit crazy writing in this movie that it actually kinda works. There are some things that get really close to deus ex machina, but I think most of that stuff works fine.

I think the first draft of this movie had to have been fucking awful. I think they managed to have at least one writer who was handed a Transformers 2 type of script and managed to fix a lot of the glaring bullshit and kind of congeal the movie into something watchable, and there's actually a reason for pretty much every scene in the movie. It's not like the pot brownies / dogs fucking / parents eating snails scenes in Transformers 2, it's not like about 40% of Transformers 3... there are actual reasons for every scene that either set up the next scene or do something for the plot.

So...  yeah...  I'm gonna say that while this movie is not trying at all to be a serious movie, I actually found it pretty fun to watch. It's not insulting me or offending me every ten minutes like a lot of other big action movies, and that's really all I need to enjoy an action movie.

Another podcast mentioned there's a Japanese character in the film (sub captain?), making the point that this was an obvious attempt to create interest in the Asian market, similar to how Toho would put B-grade Americans in its monster movies.

Paralyzed Woman Regains Use of Her Legs After 25 years in a Wheelchair; Walks Out of 'Battleship'

http://hollywoodandswine.com/paralyzed- … attleship/

All of Rihanna's lines...

http://www.vulture.com/2012/05/read-eve … eship.html

I like to think of dickheaded as an action verb.

"Then I dickheaded at an incredible speed to the humane society."

I need one of those shirts, so I can go buy that book asap.

I wouldn't read it with your dick, as they say

I think it was for Inception, where he said there was no deep meaning behind it, or at least none intentionally put in. In that case I simply found it a fun counterpoint to the talk here, about a film I had no desire to see.

Something to help with the Battleship depression: