The Battleship Movie: A Plot Summary And Review

The current big movie event is Battleship. I’m not going to see it. I’m just going to summarize and review it for you, based on what I’ve seen in trailers.

All things considered, I’d rather watch two people play this. (Photo credit: jking89)

I’ll warn you that I have done similar reviews before and I think that I am very accurate-ish. If you’re going to see Battleship you might want to pause here so I don’t ruin it for you. Please come back and confirm my accuracy after you see the film.

The Plot Summary

The movie starts one day in a Navy harbor. The day is beautiful and sunny. It is the kind of day that we all enjoy, but in action movies, indicates some bad ju-ju is about to go down.

The fleet goes out. They’re out riding around when they see something in the water. Some sailors get in a rubber raft to go see what it is. I assume that they do this on the authority of someone in charge.

Among the sailors who go out on the raft is the pretty woman sailor. She and her expendable counterparts sail up to the thing in the water. Sailing right up to something you’ve never seen before seems rash, but I’m not expendable or pretty, so what do I know?

I know quite a bit. Expendable #1 jumps off the raft onto the thing. He looks at it and turns around to have a conversation that goes something like this: “I’m standing on the thing we don’t know about, and it isn’t helping me know anything more about it. WAAAAAAAAA!” (Splash). Before he could learn anything more, the aliens in the thing taser him and make him fly into the water.

The thing comes up out of the water. It is huge, scary and it pours water over the rubber raft. This gives the pretty, unexpendable sailor the opportunity to prove that she can look both scared and intense. More importantly, it proves that she can still look good when you throw buckets of water on her.

Leave Well Enough Alone

So you might ask “What does this all have to do the board game?” Nothing.

OOOOH Scary! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The big scary alien ships rise up out of the water and shoot these gyroscope ball things at a city. Gyroscope ball things seem to be very effective weapons. They tear through buildings and destroy a lot of stuff. They are not the kind of weapon that hits and blows up, like a bomb. They fly around, smash stuff and go on to smash other stuff. They cause explosions, but they do not explode.

None of this seems to happen until the Navy goes and fools with the aliens stuff in the water. This leads to the first moral lesson of the film – Leave Well Enough Alone.

Speaking of the aliens, the Navy finds one that is dead. A group of sailors take him below decks to examine him. When they take the helmet off the alien, it kills one of the sailors.

Have you ever seen one of those videos of some yahoo who went fishing and caught a shark? One of those where the guy is standing on the dock with the dead shark hanging next to him and he sticks his arm in the shark’s mouth and then the shark’s body has one remaining electrical impulse in it…so it bites down on the guys arm? Taking the helmet off a dead alien is sort of like doing that. The dead alien/helmet scene leads to the film’s second moral lesson – Leave Well Enough Alone.

The Tie That Binds

There are two things that tie the movie Battleship to the board game of the same name. One is the name. The other is the weapon the aliens use against the naval fleet – pegs.

The aliens have a proven weapon that can wipe out an entire city. Wiping out a ship should be no problem for them. If they were to shoot a couple of gyroscopes at the boats, the aliens would sink the battleships and their crews with ease. The aliens don’t think that way.

Inexplicably, the weapon of choice against the battleship are pegs that look like the ones that stick in the game board. The pegs stick into the boats and explode. This choice proves to be the undoing of the visiting team.

Less devastating weaponry allows the Navy to fight back effectively. This leads to the third lesson of the film – Find What Works And Stick With It.

Boom

While all the battling is going on, a few aliens get aboard one of the ships. Pretty, not expendable sailor dispatches many of them using a hand gun.

Finally, some guy yells into a microphone “hit it”. This seems to indicate that someone should shoot all the weapons on the ship. It seems like a good idea. I assume the guy yelled “hit it” on the authority of someone in charge. And who do you think is wearing the headset that is connected to hit it guy’s microphone?

If you guessed pretty, non expendable sailor, you are correct. She transcends specialization: she does exploratory rubber raft trips, she shoots intruders, she pushes the button labeled “shoot everything”. The only things she does not do is jump on things in the water and take helmets off of dead aliens.

Pushing the shoot everything button proves to be the problem solver. This leads to the final lesson of the movie – The Shoot Everything Button Was Invented For A Reason.

Battleship is rated PG-13 for scenes of gratuitous water slinging, peg flinging and gyroscopes.

I give it two pegs down.