Battleship (2012): A good reason to watch your Netflix queue. Somehow this floated to the top, and I didn't realize it until I got the note that it had shipped. Oh well.
It starts with screwup Taylor Kitsch (hope that's a stage name) drinking with his brother Alexander Skarsgard and getting into a ridiculous mess over bimbo-esque Brooklyn "Double" Decker - the Megan Fox of the movie. This scene was pretty cute, actually. To get his life together, he joins the Navy, and gets rapidly promoted while still being a screwup. This part gets a little tedious - we're 20-30 minutes in and nothing has blown up.
Finally, some aliens show up and splash down in the Pacific around Hawai'i in the middle of a joint US-Japan naval exercise. And it's game on!
The aliens have several neat weapons, like a ball made of of buzzsaw blades with a chainsaw wrapped around the middle. However, the aliens seem to have very weak sensor systems, and their armor isn't all it could be. So the game isn't that lopsided. And in the end, Kitsch, noted for his terrible judgement, gets a WWII battleship out of mothballs, mans it with geriatric veterans (Isn't that Stan Lee? Nope, just an old guy with a mustache) and saves the day.
So here's the surprise twist - this is actually a pretty fun movie. Sure, it was slow to get started, and I really didn't care a bit about anyone in it, but the special effects were a gas. Wait, I take that back - Rhianna, playing a sailor, and her southern fried buddy Jesse Plemons were pretty good.
Now, I wouldn't say this was a good movie. But as far as SFX/action movies go, not so bad, a great B-movie with an A budget. They even managed to work in a few references to the game it is theoretically based on. We had fun, and would see a sequel.
But in the end, I have to rate it a failure, because nobody actually says "You sunk my battleship".
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