Battleship (2012) Directed by Peter Berg

Basically the best way you could describe this movie is that it's being a Michael Bay movie, without having Michael Bay involved with it.

It's sort of funny. Not only is the movie big and overblown, it even features the exact same camera handling, buildup and characters like a Michael Bay movie. It's as if the studio told director Peter Berg to make a Michael Bay type movie and Berg took it a bit too literally.

But in all honesty, I'm not a Bay hater, so I'm also not hating on this movie for taking such an approach. Having said that, it of course is still far from a great movie but if you want some big, dumb entertainment, this movie is well worth seeing nevertheless.

It has all the pros of a Michael Bay in it but also really all of the cons! It's a good looking and often also spectacular movie but it's very thin on its story and the characters never really become likable enough to make you care about anything that is happening in this movie. Of course it also features a far from convincing concept to begin with and the movie never really makes any good attempt to explain certain stuff or make things realistic, in any way or form.

The whole idea of the movie was already a bit crazy to begin with. Making a live action movie, based on a board game, that isn't even about maritime battles but about human ships versus aliens instead. No, of course it has very little to do with the board game 'Battleship', though the movie at one point still incorporated the concept of the board game into the movie pretty creatively. I can of course understand the studios wanting to attach the name "Battleship" to their project, since it's already a well established name and people all over the world are familiar with the game. And I can of course also understand the game manufacturer, that probably got paid big dollars and thought that the potential popularity of this movie would add to the sale of their own product as well. So this is all something I won't hold against the movie.

The movie is maintaining enough as it is. It has some good action and the special effects are all great looking. It's definitely a good movie to watch on the big screen, if you simply want to have a good time and don't want to think about stuff too much.

And just as I thought, Liam Neeson is actually hardly in this movie at all. Seems like they only casted him to have a big name attached to the project. His scenes probably got shot within the time span of a week, so please don't go watching this movie expecting to see a lot of Liam Neeson awesomeness or to see him taking on a couple of aliens and their 'battleships'.

Not a great movie in any way but it luckily still is entertaining enough.

6/10

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