Sunk: BATTLESHIP

I don’t know if the nonstop digital chaos and noise wore me down or what, but parts of Battleship aren’t that bad. The main plot point of this movie-based-on-a-board-game is that during joint military exercises between the United States and Japan off the coast of Hawaii, an alien ship of some kind comes in for a splash landing and opens fire. So the movie’s basically American and Japanese sailors protecting Pearl Harbor from alien invasion. Why, that’s almost enough to bring a tear to the eye. Well, in a better movie it would be, one interested in exploring context and building characters or metaphors or providing any sort of narrative momentum or rooting interest other than “Blow up them aliens real good!” It’s a thin blockbuster that takes forever getting started and then has little but unoriginal drivel to get to once it does.

The payoff of all this is actually somewhat competent as far as these kind of big, impersonal blow-‘em-up blockbusters go. It’s the setup that’s totally bonkers and tonally messy, which dilutes the climactic excitement, reducing it to merely better than what’s come before. Screenwriters Erich and Jon Hoeber start us off with some pretty weird scenes that collide into each other in awkward ways. First, we meet twenty-something screw-up Alex (Taylor Kitsch) sitting in a bar, getting a lecture from his Naval-officer brother (Alexander Skarsgård). It’s a grow-up and get-responsible kind of lecture that awkwardly segues into a happy-birthday cupcake. Then a blonde bombshell (Brooklyn Decker) walks in and Alex goes over to hit on her. She wants a burrito but the bartender won’t give her one this late at night. Alex tries to get one for her and ends up breaking into a closed convenience store to do so, getting tased for his troubles.

Cut to some unspecified time later. Alex is now in the Navy, too. He’s talking about marrying blondie, but she wants him to ask her dad, Admiral Liam Neeson, for her hand first. Also there’s a pre-war games soccer game between America and Japan’s sailors that he loses and a subsequent fight that he gets into. He’s in real danger of getting bounced out of the military after these military exercises are over with, but is also third in command or something. I don’t get it either. This whole jumble of exposition and character building is so confused and tone-deaf, as if the writers had a vague sense of how movies worked and figured they better set up the whos, whats, wheres, whens, and whys before getting into the action, but had little idea of how to actually go about doing that.

But then, the aliens arrive. These unseen baddies set up a force field around the islands, cutting off a few battleships from all outside help. Poor Liam Neeson can only appear in one or two scenes where he looks determined, worried, and utterly powerless to intervene. Meanwhile, blondie is stuck on the side of a Hawaiian mountain where she is occasionally called upon to interact with a veteran (real veteran Gregory D. Gadson) who has two prosthetic legs and together the two of them look over at some aliens off in the distance and look worried. It’s up to good old Alex to rise to the occasion and figure out how to stop the alien invasion. And I haven’t even mentioned the quivering scientist (Hamish Linklater), also stranded on that mountain, whose satellite array brought the aliens to Hawaii in the first place. There’s also the scowling Petty Officer played by pop star Rihanna and the comic relief (I guess?) provided by Jesse Plemons. They get to scowl and crack wise and shoot big guns.

But anyways, all these characters are trapped in this impenetrable energy bubble. I was all ready to hate the movie based on how terminally uninvolving and unbelievably sloppy I found the schlocky first hour (or more) of this 131-minute movie. Even the opening alien salvo is just nonsense, shredding city streets and toppling buildings in a familiar and dull way. A main character dies almost immediately when a battleship goes down and I hardly cared. But then a funny thing happened. The movie picks up some steam and charges forward into occasionally diverting silliness. It doesn’t get good, exactly, but it moves up from awful to just plain watchable mediocrity. By the end I wasn’t enjoying myself, exactly, but the highly improbable use of a floating museum in the climax made me smile a little.

And it’s kind of clever how the gameplay of Battleship is integrated into the movie. The battleships can’t detect the alien vessels on their radar, but luckily the alien ships can’t seem to spot them either. Luckily a Japanese officer (Tadanobu Asano) comes aboard to help the Americans detect the vessels. He does something related to water displacement and buoy sensors, but the end result is a grid that looks suspiciously like the board game. “E-11!” “Fire!” “Anything?” “It’s a miss!” The following sequence is rather suspenseful, if more than a little goofy. But it’s not any sillier than the way the alien’s missiles are cylinders with little pegs in the bottom so that they stick in the battleships before blowing up. Again, like the game. This is what’s modestly involving about the movie. I never cared about the characters. The humans are mostly indistinguishable except for the main characters that we’re told to like and root for just because they are the main characters. The aliens are just a squishy, flavorless, derivative horde. What do they even want? Who knows? Open fire!

The problem that plagues the movie all the way through is the lack of personality. That’s why the flashes of board-game-referencing winks are the most enjoyable moments; they’re the only relatable, recognizable moments. The acting’s simply functional for such dysfunctional roles. Neeson’s wasted. Kitsch is a blank. (John Carter had a much better role for him.) Rihanna could actually be a good (or even great) action star in a better movie; she has plenty of tough charm here. Linklater’s scientist gets one sort of good line when he comes crashing out of the jungle: “They killed my grad students!” Decker was hired for her cleavage. Not helping the actors much at all are the action and effects which, from the aliens’ designs right down to the nonstop weightless carnage, are just so much shiny digital confusion.

Director Peter Berg, not the most consistent of filmmakers (on the one hand, Friday Night Lights, on the other, Hancock), has shot it all in a style that can only be called watered-down Michael Bay. It’s all of the militarism and convoluted plotting with none of the idiosyncratic personality and ability to create striking imagery. Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that Bay has a distinctive style and when he’s given a big, loud set-piece to execute he knows, for better or worse, how to play it up big.  Here Berg’s only cobbling together a pale imitation, serving up so little payoff that there’s little sense waiting through the setup. 

Hammer Out Danger: THOR

The latest Marvel superhero to make it to the big screen is Thor, to my knowledge the only superhero with origins as a Norse God. That might seem tricky to assimilate into the ever-growing on-screen overlap between the various Marvel properties, especially with more Earthbound sci-fi heroes like Iron Man and the Hulk, but this big flashy summer tentpole is up to the task, especially with its nimble mixing of genres. The director is Kenneth Branagh, a fine actor, member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, turned director most notable for his Shakespearean adaptations, some of them quite good. With Thor he mixes a bit of high drama with a bit of low comedy and, to my surprise, it works quite well. It may not make a lot of sense some of the time, but it sure is fun while it lasts.

After a little teaser of an opening scene, the movie dives straight into mythological bombast and fantasy spectacle with the dramas of Odin (a fun Anthony Hopkins) and his royal court. He’s a Norse God who rules over Asgard, a kingdom set up in a towering mountain that emerges out of a cloudy nebula in space. (You read that right). He is a wise warrior who has successfully beaten back the Frost Giants of Jotunheim. This is the kind of movie that throws out crazy names and elaborate backstory without a second thought but is ultimately better off for it. This is a movie that starts with a fast pace and then keeps it up throughout, thundering towards its conclusion. No need to linger on nomenclature and fantasy semantics when there’s matters of grave importance to get to, namely the matter of the royal lineage in Asgard.

Odin has two sons and heirs. One is Thor (Chris Hemsworth), strong and impetuous, who has flowing blonde locks, a heavy magic hammer and a billowing red cape. His brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), slim with slicked-back hair and dark attire, is a jealous conniver. We can practically tell good and evil by nothing more than hairstyle and costuming but Hemsworth and Hiddleston are a bit subtler with their roles than you might expect. They do, however, fit perfectly in the oversized world in which they live.

Theirs is a big glittery world with sweeping colorful vistas and gleaming flying buttresses and a portal to other worlds that sits at the end of a rainbow bridge and sends these Norse God warriors off in a cloud of dust and lightning. After some Frost Giants sneak into the palace (and are promptly vaporized), it’s through this mode of transportation that Thor and some warrior pals show up at Jotunheim and beat up on them for breaking the treaty. Furious that Thor would try to provoke a new war, Odin banishes him to Earth, stripping him of his Godlike powers in the process.

Once on Earth, the movie plays out on parallel tracks. Thor finds himself in a fish-out-of-water story in a small New Mexico town. There he is found by a scientist (Natalie Portman) who has been studying the strange patterns of the night sky of the kind that he arrived in. With her mentor (Stellan Skarsgård) and intern (Kat Dennings), the three of them provide a mortal chorus of skeptics and incredulous observers to counterbalance the rush of entertaining gobbledygook that forms the opening sequences.

But that gobbledygook is turned into the stuff of pseudo-Shakespearian drama back in Asgard, where the other track of plotting is given over to Machiavellian scheming. Loki wants the throne for himself and the question of lineage and politics weighs heavy on the Asgardians. In gilded rooms featuring the perfect combination of regality and gaudiness designed by Bo Welch, Thor’s warrior pals (including great cinematic tough-guys Ray Stevenson and Tadanobu Asano as well as relative unknowns Jamie Alexander and Josh Dallas) fret and scheme about how to ensure Loki doesn’t end up sitting on the throne.

The constant juggling between earthbound conflicts – a mysterious (though recognizable from the Iron Mans) governmental organization has set up camp outside town to research a strange hammer that fell in the desert – and the epic tale of Asgard merges nicely. It’s a potentially unsteady mix, but it works because of the seriousness with which the filmmakers take both the drama and the comedy. Never once do they condescend to their own material. The film uses the humans to comment on the oversized nature of Thor in a little coffee shop or Asgard’s warriors strutting down Main Street, but it doesn’t stop these larger-than-life characters from feeling perfectly scaled to fit their homeworld. Both realms are filmed in deep, rich colors with the striking cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos making liberal use of oblique angles that join the realms with a similar sense of slinking dread. There’s a feeling that something is rotten in Asgard and it could escape to infect Earth where Thor better learn how to get his powers (and hammer) back in fighting shape.

This is a movie of zippy action mixed with genuinely funny laughs, but it never undermines itself. It frontloads a lot of dense exposition but manages to make it entertaining. It’s a movie with a high silliness quotient and sets out to prove that it’s worthy of using its set-up for some hammer-slamming, breastplate-knocking battles and some not entirely insignificant drama. It’s not primarily a movie of action, though it fulfills that promise, more or less. This is a movie of plot and noise that pays attention to its mood, off-kilter ponderousness that, when mixed with a healthy serving of intentional comedy, ultimately makes this lively effects-heavy blockbuster fairly addictive.