Saturday, August 18, 2012

Movie review - "Battleship" (2012) ** (warning: spoilers)

Not as appalling as I feared it would be, and probably great if you are a 12 year old boy. It is clunky in spots, Taylor Kitsch is not a movie star, Liam Neeson is barely in the movie, the special effects aren't very good (it feels like a cartoon), there are dumb lines and scenes (e.g. the soccer game), some of it is achingly predictable (e.g. knowing that brother is going to be a dead duck).

But there are effective moments, which really work - the redemption of a crippled veteran, Taylor realising he's in charge of the whole show, co-operation with the Japanese (they probably could have done another nationality here), the friendship between the American and the Japanese captain, the battleship sequence (only a small section of the film), and most of all using the USS Missouri to take on the aliens, manned by veterans (NB why not make one of them a character).

This isn't a good movie, but once things start blowing up I did keep watching, which is a lot more than I expected.

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