You Sank My... Eh, Whatever

The idea of building a movie off of a board game is absurd. Most board games are simple affairs, light on plot (if there is any plot at all) and designed more around a mechanic than any sense of story. You could probably build a "story" around a game of Settlers of Catan, for example, but that would be mostly head-canon and isn't really supported by the materials in the game itself. Anyone that looks at a board game and says, "yeah, this lends itself well to a movie," is either lying, stupid, or playing one of those 8,000 piece monstrosities with "Legacy" somewhere in the title.

And yet, in the great pantheon of films, there is one movie that managed to make a solid, and even quite good, film out of a board game. That movie was Clue from 1985. I know you were likely expecting me to say Battleship, but this film is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination. A poorly conceived, half-baked attempt at an Independence Day riff, the film barely manages to keep itself on the rails, let alone find any way to tie in anything from the board game in the process. I don't know what the producers were thinking, but what they came up with isn't a good adaptation of Battleship.

A good film based on the board game would have to be about two equal powers, locked in a war, slowly plinking away at each other. I could see it as some kind of Cold War era epic, the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R. with both sides fairly depicted as they vie for control over a key section of the ocean, their men slowly losing faith in the war, on both sides, as each of their ships is taken out by the opposing force. That not only works the basic one-v-one play of the game into the film, but it also creates something that at least feels interesting. That's a film that sounds worth watching.

Instead, what we get is an "America! Fuck yeah!" film with the crew of a Navy battleship (well, okay, a destroyer, but the battleship comes in later) going up against an armada of aliens from a distant world. Why space aliens? Likely so they didn't have to have the sailors take on any specific superpower and piss off foreign countries. That's why we get a scene of the aliens attacking China, so that the Chinese people can watch it in theaters and say, "yeah, those aliens need to pay!" It's a very crass, money-grubbing film. Thankfully audiences seemed to get that as the film only managed to just clear is... holy hell, studios spent $250 Million on a Battleship film?! Jeez.

In the movie, scientists send a signal to a newly discovered habitable planet, dubbed Planet G, halfway across the galaxy. Seven years later, Earth gets a message back in the form of five ships (see, because there's five ships on each side of the game) that come crashing down to Earth. These ships land right in the middle of a Navy training exercise, really messing up everyone's plans. Before the full force of the American military can be launched against the aliens, a protective shield is up up over a few miles of ocean, trapping the training ships in with the alien vessels for a very different kind of war games.

One ship has our hero, Lieutenant Commander Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), a real fuck-up who, even when he joined the Navy at the behest of his brother, Stone (Alexander Skarsgard), still can't help but be a fuck-up. He's the one that is sent over to explore the alien ship, from the outside, and ends up firing on the thing, causing the first round of back-and-forth volleys that destroys his brother's ship and get his brother killed. Now the ranking officer in this little makeshift fleet, Alex has to find a way to stop the aliens, and save the Earth, before the aliens find a way to send a signal back home to launch an invasion fleet.

The film is, frankly, pretty stupid. It takes a lot of leaps of logic to get our heroes in the right place, to get the aliens down to Earth, and to lock everyone in together. And let's be clear, Alex, our hero, should never have been in the military to begin with. Even with his brother calling the shots the guy should have washed out years earlier as there's nothing about him that screams "officer material". He'd be in the brig for half his career, and then dishonorably discharged before he even set foot on an actual vessel. There's no way he makes it to Lt. Commander on a ship in just seven years, no matter what the movie would want us to believe.

But, of course, the film has to have everything that makes for a crowd-pleasing, popcorn selling film. So we get the (largely) faceless aliens that come down without any explanation as to their goals, fighting with giant spaceships that cause tons of CGI carnage, all while PG-13 approved violence happens everywhere. All the main players manages to survive, again and again, not because they're good at their jobs but because they're "the good guys" so of course they have to survive. It's not an alien invasion film from middle-brow Hollywood if the aliens aren't sent packing at the end, right?

And the crass "America Woooooo!" themes frankly make the film hard to watch. This was clearly a film backed by the finances of the U.S. military, made to be a propaganda flick for how cool the Navy really is. We get plenty of montages of the heroes working away at their jobs was Dad Rock from 1970s and 1980s plays (like ACDC, ZZ Top, and Creedence). It's all a little too clean and tidy, a little too patriotic, and little too hard to stomach.

And all of this for a film that basically feels like the producers said, "let's make Independence Day, but on the ocean." I don't know if the producers thought that having the license to Battleship would help this film or not, but what the movie really needed was a deeper story, with more to care about than some fuck-up that can't get his shit together, somehow failing upwards in his military career. This is not a film that you really enjoy, it's a movie that just kind of happens and you try not to be too bored as it goes on.

Battleship is a very handsome looking, but otherwise very terrible movie. You get to see all $250 Mil of the budget on screen (that number is still stupid for an adaptation of a board game) but it barely amounts to anything. There are better alien invasion films out there, better action films, hell even better patriotic films. Most of all, there's already the pinnacle of board game-to-film out there, 1985's Clue, and why even try to top that with this middle-brow, half-baked trash?