So I just saw Battleship...

[mithie]

... and it was ah... pretty stupid.

Basically, the entire plot revolves around what could only be an alien invasion plan drafted up with consultation from those signs aliens.

Not to spoil anything here, but these aliens, who travelled LIGHTYEARS to get to Earth, lost their communication ship (the lynchpin of their entire invasion plan) by ramming into one of our satellites during re-entry (oops!) which forces them to play a literal game of battleship with the US Navy.

Why wasn't the film over in the first 10 minutes since the aliens clearly had technology that was centuries ahead of us? Because the aliens are blinded by sunlight and so have to resort to firing unguided salvos. Yes, that's right. These aliens, who supposedly came from a planet much like ours, orbiting their own sun at a similar distance, are fucked by sunlight.

Anyway, it's a ridiculous film, not that it matters. The only reason you'd ever go to watch this movie is for the battleship porn, and yeah, you'll get your battleship porn. This movie is a 2.5 hour porn flick with an average of 1000 displacement tons worth of ship porn per second on screen. It's got CIWS porn, stylized missile porn, and yes, battleship porn starring Miss Missouri. I genuinely stopped giving a shit about the plot around 40 minutes in.

Oh, and the mixture of a sappy romantic subplot and 16 inch motherfucking deck guns makes this a pretty good movie to bring your girlfriend/spouse to.

[evilsoup]

Does anyone at any point say a variation of 'you sunk my battle ship'?

Like, for example; after the captain's Battleship has been sunk and he's about to set off a bomb to take out an alien thingy
CREWMAN: Sir! Come on, we've got to go!
CAPTAIN: They sunk my battleship
That sort of thing?
Because if it doesn't, there's no reason for me to watch this film.

[mithie]

No

Although there was a 15 minute long sequence where a bunch of guys look at a grid and shout random coordinates.

[Simon_Jester]

I wonder. Did they just write a fully generic "aliens invade" script, then look around for some IP they could buy the movie rights to for a title and arbitrarily settle on Battleship?

Happened for Starship Troopers.

[Bug-Eyed Earl]

I knew there would be something monumentally stupid about the plot; a featurette touts how they're using real science in talking about habitable zones around stars and how the plot spun off of Stephen Hawking's warnings against letting aliens know where we are- and then we saw a scene were a radio telescope shot a beam of energy into space, and the fact that the message was sent in 2005, according to the movie and only the Centauri system and Wolf 359 are close enough to receive that message, so if there were hostile, colonizing aliens out there, they would have been here centuries ago since we're so damn close.

It think this is another case of idiot filmmakers, not artistic license. Kind of the same way Ron Moore was so enamored with Mitochondrial Eve, even though she really was nothing special.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Yup, pretty nothing but cool Navy porn.

There's isnt a "you sunk my battleship" line, but there is a "They won't sink this old battleship yet."

[mithie]

And Rhianna.

There's also Rhianna.

So Battleship porn and Rhianna.

[Eternal_Freedom]

And the hilarity that is a large black guy with two artifical legs beating up an alien with his walking stick.

Was Rihanna the girl on the John Paul Jones or the blonde chick Hopper was chasing?

[AniThyng]

And the hilarity that is a large black guy with two artifical legs beating up an alien with his walking stick.

Was Rihanna the girl on the John Paul Jones or the blonde chick Hopper was chasing?

So you're saying you don't know what Rihanna even vaguely looks like?

But that's okay, I'm sure you knew the differences between a Flight I Burke, a Flight II Burke and a Kongo, right?

[DPDarkPrimus]

Does Liam Neeson sacrifice himself to save the kid dating his daughter?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Nope, no idea. My musical tastes lie elsewhere.

And yes, I could tell you (as I told my friend) that JPJ was a Flight I and Sampson was Flight II. I am that sad. I also filled his brain with interesting trivia about the Missouri.

Nope, Liam Neeson stays outside the big bubble while yelling at the government.

[The Imperator]

The aliens sound... incredibly inept.

[phongn]

I wonder. Did they just write a fully generic "aliens invade" script, then look around for some IP they could buy the movie rights to for a title and arbitrarily settle on Battleship?

No. Universal signed a deal with Hasbro to make a bunch of movies based on games.

[mr friendly guy]

I was hoping someone just gave Hopper a whacking. He just irritated me and you just know he was somehow going to turn it around and become the hero.

Meanwhile with the aliens with the ridiculous weakness, I am still trying to decide

1) whether they received our signal and was invading with a token force, and then trying to contact reinforcements (one wonders why they didn't bring it in the first place), or

2) whether they just happened to be in our vicinity, and decided to hijack our light speed communication system to send a signal somewhere else with modified tech to make it FTL so it would arrive in a decent time frame, ie making these aliens not the one we were trying to contact in the opening scene.

I am still leaning towards the second option.

And in the final analysis, Battleship still sucked. Fortunately I used my Hoyts free ticket to see it.

[Steel]

Slight spoilers:

We don't even really know if they were actually hostile.

They never attacked anything that wasn't a threat or fired first*. They specifically were shown to not attack people once they were disarmed, and only escalated attacks as they were fired on.

Were they actually coming to bring peace etc but couldn't talk once they lost the communication ship?

The aliens did seem to be following some strict and quite passive rules of engagement.

*Slight exception being the grad student and a couple of other guys, but that might just he bad IFF or errors by individuals...

[Darth Lucifer]

All I got to say about this film is "MISS."

[AniThyng]

Well I did think our was hilarious when they responded to being honked at with sonic weapons

Really all said and done it was better than everything in its genre except battle la. But this it mainly because I like ships. Skyline had ships but only in a vague boring way

[jollyreaper]

I don't even get why they had to pick aliens for the premise here. I mean shit, fleet action between battleships. Not a hard concept. Borrow from Ace Combat where it's real world designs in a fictional setting. 1945 tech so radar-fused shells make planes vulnerable. Give that to all factions. Have the enemy ships be recognizably real ships from history. Yamato and Bismarck vs Iowa-class ships. Maybe even include the super-battleships that barely made it off the drawing board by the end of the war.

Or if you really want nerd squee, nuclear-powered battleship firing atomic shells. Both sides fighting with these. Splosions everywhere!!!!!! Leave all personal life concerns ashore. It's a duel between two admirals who are trying to get inside eachother's heads.

Aliens? Fuck that noise. This movie is Retard Level Palin.

[Fenreer]

So the Mighty Mo, decommissioned for twenty years and now serving as a museum comes to life and saves us from Stevie Wonder? I appreciate the warning. Sounds like the perfect rainy-day flick from Redbox.

[Simon_Jester]

Alas, IRL, Missouri has had her guns decommissioned and the spare barrels sold off.

[TimothyC]

Nope, no idea. My musical tastes lie elsewhere.

And yes, I could tell you (as I told my friend) that JPJ was a Flight I and Sampson was Flight II.

Your friend is wrong. USS Sampson (DDG-102) is a Flight IIA. The exterior differences between the Flight I (DDG-51), the Flight IA (DDG-52 to DDG-71), and the Flight II (DDG-72 to DDG-78) are so minor that without close inspection (outside of any visible markings such as hull numbers) it would be very hard to tell the difference. The Flight IIA (DDG-79 to Present) have the distinctive hanger aft, and the associated raised aft SPY-1D faces. The Kongo Class, while outwardly similar to the early flight Burkes, has a lattice mast aft of the main superstructure that is similar to the original plans for the Burkes, but was dropped in favor of the lower RCS pole like mast they were built with.

Seeing this movie is still on my "Maybe" list.

[someone_else]

The moment the alien craft shot those weird mortar-like rounds it thought:

Waitassec.... THEY LOOK LIKE THE BOARD GAME'S PINS (the ones you place on the board to keep track of where you and the other player shot).

I was fucking laughing from that moment on.

Also, Hopper was so hilariously stupid it hurts.

It think this is another case of idiot filmmakers, not artistic license.

I found amusing a few other retarded points:

The fact the spacecraft were moving FTL even during the fucking approach to Earth (less than a minute from outer system to reentry? Lololololololol ).

The fact they keep pulling the "it's made of elements not on the periodic table" regardless of how nonesense that is (the communication thingie).

Also I wonder if such an obvious approach would not prompt an ABM barrage whenever the alien craft get in range.
I mean, if they are supposed to stop nukes they should be ready to launch anytime.

Last but not least, the shield-thing does not appear to get into water as well. Bypassing it by going underwater (like say with submarines) or even getting close to it with a rubber dingy sounds slightly smarter than flying an aitrcraft through it.

[Enigma]

You guys are going to make Kanastrous cry.

[Steel]

You guys are going to make Kanastrous cry.

Well I liked it. Everything looked excellent.

Maybe Kanastrous can clear up what was going on with the alien ROE and IFF if he was involved in making that too?

Didn't really get into the characters all that much. When it came to the ceremony at the end I suddenly thought "Oh shit he did have a brother at the start of this didn't he!"

[NecronLord]

I actually liked Battleship. I went in with low expectations, and it exceeded them in every way. What the hell were you people who go on about it being 'an action flick' or whatever, expecting? Goddamn Hamlet? Terminator 2? Are you retards? It promised cool alien space boats, and the US navy fighting it, and some female leads who are easy on the eye. That is what it delivered, and it did so very well.

Of course, after you see Hopper doing the "worlds' stupidest criminals" gig, you know just how seriously they're treating it. The comedy hit the nail repeatedly, the aliens were not that stupid (they had a weakness, sure, but the comparison to signs is fuck-off stupid, the humans only found out about that weakness by investigation and they only managed to exploit it once, albiet at a critical moment. Are we banning any alien from having a weakness now?

I knew there would be something monumentally stupid about the plot; a featurette touts how they're using real science in talking about habitable zones around stars and how the plot spun off of Stephen Hawking's warnings against letting aliens know where we are- and then we saw a scene were a radio telescope shot a beam of energy into space, and the fact that the message was sent in 2005, according to the movie and only the Centauri system and Wolf 359 are close enough to receive that message, so if there were hostile, colonizing aliens out there, they would have been here centuries ago since we're so damn close.

The beam was FTL, as it reached the Gliese 581 system, where the aliens were said to come from, and the aliens expected to be able to use the technology to summon reinforcements in a strategically useful timescale.

Does Liam Neeson sacrifice himself to save the kid dating his daughter?

No.

Presuming you don't mind spoilers:
Spoiler

He is stuck outside the theatre shield, he (well, his fleet) saves the day at the end.

Slight spoilers:

We don't even really know if they were actually hostile.

They never attacked anything that wasn't a threat or fired first*. They specifically were shown to not attack people once they were disarmed, and only escalated attacks as they were fired on.

Were they actually coming to bring peace etc but couldn't talk once they lost the communication ship?

The aliens did seem to be following some strict and quite passive rules of engagement.

*Slight exception being the grad student and a couple of other guys, but that might just he bad IFF or errors by individuals...

That was my impression too. We only get the image of an actual invasion from one wounded, kidnapped, (civilian?) and it might be wishful thinking on his part for all we know.

The aliens were actually really decent chaps. By the standards of movie aliens.