8 / 10
Official trailer
Battleship is fun. That’s the review and the point of it. Peter Berg made a two-hour naval action film out of a Hasbro board game, spent more than $200 million doing it, and delivered something loud, dumb and enjoyable from the first explosion to the last.
Taylor Kitsch plays Alex Hopper, a screw-up lieutenant who gets his commission through his brother, played by Alexander Skarsgård. Liam Neeson plays the admiral whose daughter Hopper wants to marry. Rihanna, in her first film role, plays a gunner’s mate. Tadanobu Asano plays the Japanese captain who ends up being the most competent officer in the fleet.
I loved this thing, and I’m not going to pretend it’s smarter than it is. A board game, a navy, aliens and a pile of explosions shouldn’t add up to a great time, and for me they do. Leave your brain at the door and it pays you back with interest.
It cost about $209 million and made roughly $303 million, and at that budget it counted as a disappointment. It’s an 8, and you have to switch your brain off to get there.
The Setup
Earth beams a signal at a potentially habitable planet. Something answers. Five alien craft come down in the Pacific in the middle of the RIMPAC naval exercise off Hawaii, and one of them punches a hole in Hong Kong on the way past.
The aliens throw up an energy barrier around the exercise area, trapping three destroyers inside with them. Everything senior to Hopper dies in the first engagement, so a lieutenant who was arrested for breaking into a convenience store over a burrito ends up commanding a ship in a first-contact war. The rest is a naval battle in a box. Nobody can get in, nobody can get out, and the film tells you where everything is at all times.
The Board Game Scene
The sequence everyone remembers is the one where the destroyer loses its radar and starts firing on a grid, using tsunami buoys to guess the alien ship’s position. Somebody calls out coordinates. They fire. They miss. They adjust.
It’s the board game, staged straight, and it’s the single best idea in the film. Most toy adaptations bury the source. This one puts it front and center and makes the mechanic work as a tactical problem, and I grin through every miss and every adjustment. The scene also gives the film something most modern blockbusters lack: a clear procedure the audience understands. You know exactly what the crew is trying to do and why it’s difficult.
For Writers
The film’s best sequence takes the mechanic of the board game, firing blind on a grid, and stages it as a tactical problem the audience can follow. An unusual constraint does more for a scene than more firepower. When you write action, take something away from your characters, their sight, their communications, their best weapon, and make them solve the problem with what’s left. List the tools your protagonist relies on. Remove the most important one and write the scene again. You’ll find out fast whether the tension was coming from the character or from the equipment.
The Missouri
The last act belongs to the USS Missouri, the battleship moored at Pearl Harbor as a museum ship since 1998. With the modern destroyers gone, Hopper and the survivors take her out with a crew of elderly veterans who served aboard her.
It’s ridiculous, and it’s my favorite stretch of the movie. Real veterans appear on screen, the ship is real, the sixteen-inch guns fire, and Berg shoots the sequence with real affection for the old machine and the men who ran her. Once those old sailors take their stations I’m all in, and I don’t give a damn about plausibility.
The anchor-drag turn, where they use the anchor to swing the ship around on a dime, is nonsense as engineering and terrific as cinema.
The Cast
Kitsch is fine. Hopper’s arc from idiot to officer is standard, and the film doesn’t spend long on it. Skarsgård is good and dies early. Brooklyn Decker’s role exists to give the ground subplot someone to worry about.
Rihanna is better than she was given credit for. She plays a petty officer with a weapon and a job, she’s convincing doing it, and she doesn’t try to act beyond the part.
Tadanobu Asano is the real asset. Nagata starts as Hopper’s rival in a soccer game and ends up running weapons on the Missouri, and the film’s most interesting relationship is the two of them learning to work together. Liam Neeson is barely in it, despite the posters.
Peter Berg’s Navy
Berg has a thing about the military, and it shows in the best way here. The ships are shot with real attention, the crews behave like crews, and the Navy cooperated fully, and that gives the film hardware nobody could afford to fake. His action is clear. You always know which ship is where, what it’s firing at and what happens when it hits. That’s more than most films of this size manage. He’d go on to make Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon, both far more serious films about men doing dangerous work. Battleship is the popcorn version of the same interest.
For Writers
Berg shoots real ships with real sailors and the film gains a solidity that no amount of computer work buys. Accurate detail builds trust that gets the audience through the parts you invented. When you write something implausible, ground it in a world you’ve researched properly, so the reader is already accepting your facts before you ask them to accept your aliens. Research the ordinary part of your story until you could pass for an insider. Spend that credibility on the one impossible thing. Readers will follow you a long way if the ground under them is solid.
Hawaii and RIMPAC
The film is built around the Rim of the Pacific exercise, the real multinational naval war game held off Hawaii every two years, and that setting does a lot of unglamorous work. It explains why a fleet from several countries is sitting in one place, why they’re already at sea, and why nobody ashore can help. Berg shot at Pearl Harbor and on active vessels, with sailors filling out the background, and the ships behave like ships. Ammunition has to be moved. Orders go through people. Damage matters. That grounding is why the alien stuff works better than it should. The film justifies its spectacle by spending an hour showing you a functioning navy first.
For Writers
The film borrows a real naval exercise so its impossible premise starts on solid ground: real ships, real procedures, real reasons for everyone to be there. Borrowed reality answers a reader’s practical objections before they surface. When you build a wild scenario, find the actual event or institution that would put your characters in that position and use it. Search for the real-world situation closest to your premise. Steal its logistics, its jargon and its schedule, and your invention will stop feeling arbitrary.
The Dumb Parts
The aliens are a mess. Their motivation is thin, their design is generic, and the rules of their technology change to suit the scene. They wear armor that looks like every other film alien of the period. The ground subplot, in which a wounded veteran and a scientist climb a mountain to destroy a transmitter, is tedious filler. Every minute spent there is a minute not spent on a ship. I’d have cut most of it and given the time to the Missouri. The dialogue is functional, the jokes are broad, and the film has no interest in being anything other than what it is. Knowing that going in is most of the trick.
Why It Works Anyway
Because it commits. There’s no irony in it, no apology for being a board game movie, and no attempt to build a sad backstory for the aliens. It wants to blow things up at sea and it does.
The Missouri sequence, the grid-firing scene and the sheer size of the hardware get the film past its own stupidity, and AC/DC on the soundtrack tells you exactly what kind of evening you’re in for.
That’s an 8 from me. Not a good film by most measures, and a thoroughly enjoyable one.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Battleship knows what it is and never apologizes for it, and that’s why it works when smarter films of its size collapse. A story that commits to its own premise beats one that keeps signaling it’s above the material. Decide what your book is for, then deliver that without hedging.
Is Battleship worth watching?
Yes, if you want a loud naval action film and nothing more. The grid-firing scene and the Missouri’s last run are worth the ticket, the hardware is real, and it never drags.
It’s an 8 on the enjoyment scale and considerably less on any other scale, and I’m happy with that trade. The generic aliens and the mountain subplot are what keep it from climbing higher. Everything on the water is exactly the movie I wanted, from the grid-firing to the anchor drag. Turn your brain off first.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Battleship (film), Wikipedia
- Mighty Mo Celebrates 15 Years at Historic Pearl Harbor, Battleship Missouri Memorial
- Battleship (2012), IMDb
