Giant Freakin Robot

Battleship hasn’t been able to convince many to come aboard here in the states, despite inexplicably making huge bank overseas. I’d suggest that the American box-office failure is because all the trailers looked horrible, but then I remember that the Transformers movies have collectively made approximately a bazillion dollars, so that can’t be it. Still, while Battleship is at best a guilty pleasure, the movie does feature some cool designs, and you can see those ideas on display in the pics posted by concept artist Josh Nizzi. Battleship may be a stinker, but I can’t help but admire the craftsmanship that went into images like this one:

For those of you who didn’t see Battleship this weekend, and judging by the domestic boxoffice numbers not many of you did, E!’s The Soup took a moment out of their busy schedule to spoof Peter Berg’s love letter to science fiction excess. Granted, Battleship is already a caricature of the epic scale action movies of Michael Bay, but that’s not going to stop anyone from poking fun at it.

I actually enjoyed Battleship more than I’m entirely comfortable admitting in a public forum. I won’t claim it’s good, in fact it’s terrible in nearly every way a movie can be terrible, but it is just absurd enough to be enjoyable in the right frame of mind. The entire plot is kick started by a stolen microwave chicken burrito, so right away you know exactly what kind of ride it’s going to be. And when the theme from The Pink Panther plays as the protagonist breaks into a convenience store to steal said chicken burrito, something clicks and you realize that Berg is also aware of exactly how absurd his movie is.

The numbers are in and to no one’s surprise Battleship, the alien invasion sci-fi movie inspired by the Milton Bradley board game which has nothing to do with aliens, is a huge box office flop… but only in the United States.

In the USA where we’re often accused of being too dumb to know what’s good, Americans wisely avoided this sci-fi disaster in favor of seeing The Avengers. Battleship only opened at #2 with a meager $25 million which, in the past, might have sent a clear message to Hollywood. It might have let them know that this kind of watered down, shooting aliens only because it won’t offend anyone, science fiction isn’t worth doing anymore. But it won’t.

Instead the message Hollywood got this weekend was that movies like Battleship are still a cash-cow. They’ll get that message because even though the film was a total failure to earn in the United States it’s wildly popular overseas. So popular that they’ve already made their entire $209 million budget back. Sure Battleship has only made $25 million in the United States and likely won’t last in movie theaters more than a couple of weeks, but everywhere else in the world audiences are showing up to see it in droves. It’s made over $215 million dollars.

In theory director Peter Berg’s Battleship is supposed to be based on the popular guessing game of the same name. In reality there’s almost no connection between Battleship the movie and its Milton Bradley namesake at all, outside of a single thrilling ten-minute sequence involving buoys, missiles, and a big board. The rest of the movie is a puzzle made up of pieces cribbed from some of history’s most infamously ridiculous summer blockbusters.

Battleship is an alien invasion movie, I guess, but it’s also one of the many recent Hollywood movies which only really uses aliens because killing them won’t offend anyone. Like any alien species imagined under such creatively corrupted circumstances, these extraterrestrials aren’t very good at their job.

They land in the middle of a naval excercise, which might not be tactically ridiculous if their ships had some sort of technological superiority which would enable them to crush their human opponents without a thought, but they don’t. Their ships can’t even fly. Instead they sort of flop about in the water and shoot at the Navy with weapons which, while weirder, aren’t all that much more effective than those used on the deck of a World War II era battleship. Actually, they’re exactly that effective, as the movie later goes on to demonstrate.