Battleship, The Movie

Yes, I sat down and watched this fine Hollywood extravaganza while eating Xmas ham.

I am so very, very glad I didn't see this one in the theaters. Its almost as if there was this conceptually (possibly) interesting alien invasion/exodus movie that got buried under a huge steaming odorous pile of merchandising tie-in. There's even a seemingly endless sequence with coordinates like "I-Eleven" being called out to a fire control officer to shoot blindly and see if they got a hit ... and yes, that's every bit as exciting as I'm sure you're imagining.

That alien invasion/exodus movie that might have been, if Hasbro hadn't shat a ton of money on it? There's one very brief sequence - the only communication between any Earthman and the aliens, so brief that if you blinked you'd miss it - that shows a planet being bombarded, ground forces moving through a torn landscape, all delivered in a burst of images. It's five seconds long.

Here's the rub - not all the ship designs in that burst match with the ones that are *here*, on Earth. We see the planet being nuked (from orbit?), and ships fleeing the destruction. Lots of fireballs, napalm-like strikes, that sort of thing. But, here on Earth, they're using different weapons.

The folks who nuked that planet are not these folks. Just that - and why *these* folks are here - would have made a far more interesting story than the Battleship game between us (the humans) and the other (weird space aliens) we actually got.

(Another item that is likely unintentional, just because the science is that bad in this film, is that the aliens arrive long before the signal we sent out would have reached their planet. Perhaps they were already en-route, and less than a year out, when they intercepted the signal?)

Battleship, The Movie

Yes, I sat down and watched this fine Hollywood extravaganza while eating Xmas ham.

I am so very, very glad I didn't see this one in the theaters. Its almost as if there was this conceptually (possibly) interesting alien invasion/exodus movie that got buried under a huge steaming odorous pile of merchandising tie-in. There's even a seemingly endless sequence with coordinates like "I-Eleven" being called out to a fire control officer to shoot blindly and see if they got a hit ... and yes, that's every bit as exciting as I'm sure you're imagining.

That alien invasion/exodus movie that might have been, if Hasbro hadn't shat a ton of money on it? There's one very brief sequence - the only communication between any Earthman and the aliens, so brief that if you blinked you'd miss it - that shows a planet being bombarded, ground forces moving through a torn landscape, all delivered in a burst of images. It's five seconds long.

Here's the rub - not all the ship designs in that burst match with the ones that are *here*, on Earth. We see the planet being nuked (from orbit?), and ships fleeing the destruction. Lots of fireballs, napalm-like strikes, that sort of thing. But, here on Earth, they're using different weapons.

The folks who nuked that planet are not these folks. Just that - and why *these* folks are here - would have made a far more interesting story than the Battleship game between us (the humans) and the other (weird space aliens) we actually got.

(Another item that is likely unintentional, just because the science is that bad in this film, is that the aliens arrive long before the signal we sent out would have reached their planet. Perhaps they were already en-route, and less than a year out, when they intercepted the signal?)