Battleship is an epic scale action-adventure which takes place on the sea, in the air and on land as the planet battles for survival against a superior force. Based on the wildly popular 1960′s Hasbro board game ‘Battleship’ this movie with the same name is exactly what I imagine the game would be like if the game were a high speed testosterone fueled exploding rampage of carnage and destruction!
Truth be told I’d said, numerous times as I watched the trailers that I thought the movie was a bit Transformers, meets Independence Day meets the Abyss with a sprinkle of Armageddon thrown in for good measure. I wasn’t wrong!
Peter Berg (Hancock, The Kingdom, Friday Night Lights) both directs and produces Battleship; which stars Taylor Kitsch (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, John Carter) as Lieutenant Alex Hopper, a naval weapons officer assigned to the USS John Paul Jones; Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood, Melancholia) as Hopper’s older brother Stone who happens to be commander of the USS Sampson.
Global music superstar Rihanna makes her motion picture debut as Petty Officer 2nd Class Cora Raikes, hopper’s crewmate and a weapons specialist on the JPJ. Sports Illustrated supermodel Brooklyn Decker (Just Go With It) comes into her second film as Sam Shane, Hopper’s fiancee and a physical therapist specializing in the rehabilitation of military combat veterans.
The ladies in this movie are no joke at all. They are some strong kick ass take names types! Also cast in his debut is U.S. Army Colonel Gregory D. Gadson, a battalion leader who lost both legs in Iraq in 2007. Gadson plays Lieutenant Colonel Mick Canales, an Army combat veteran and double amputee who begins his recovery just as the alien attack begins, and he gets to hang out with Brooklyn Decker through out the movie.
The movie is set during the biennial RIMPAC or Rim of the Pacific exercise which is the worlds largest international maritime event where over a dozen of the world’s navies gather to participate; which is the prime time to attack if you’re an alien race hell bent on world domination!
It is no accident that these aliens find us. The brains over at NASA have discovered a planet that is very much like our own and shares the same relationship with their sun as we do with ours, blah blah blah science stuff! End result they start beaming a message in the direction of that planet. Unfortunately for us the aliens answer, but not with the standard greeting.
Instead these aliens take wrong numbers seriously and send an extermination force to Earth and so begins the battle!
All in all I think this film is great fun and certainly gets a green light from us. The visuals are awesome especially the drifting scene, you’ll know it when you see it, the characters are likeable and you can connect with them quickly, and the action is well pretty much non-stop.
Battleship from Universal Pictures opens in theaters May 18, 2012! Crank up your speakers for this trailer!
