Peter Berg
Battleship

“In association with Hasbro” is an opening that helps: you know from the start, even if like me you haven't seen the trailer, that you shouldn't expect anything. You are about to watch a film based on the wonderful adventures of the Battleship game, need I say more?

Hollywood is so desperate that it no longer limits itself to recycling and/or dismembering video game scripts; creating them from scratch for board games is the new frontier, and there's no purist or fan of the product who can complain about the film's lack of fidelity. Brilliant. I eagerly await a good war film about Risk!, maybe with Oceania allied with Asia, the Monopoly one about a mafia massacre in Piazza Giulio Cesare, a nice psychological thriller based on Guess Who?, a horror on Operation, and a nice porn flick inspired by Twister.

I was saying, you can't do more than watch the film without expecting anything, and starting from the bottom of the barrel for a moment you'll believe that it might somehow get better. Instead, you have to deal with a dreadful cast, a stupid and annoying protagonist who you'll hope dies at any moment, Liam Neeson who only God knows what the hell he's doing here, Rihanna mimicking Michelle Rodriguez, and a bunch of charisma-lacking dullards too incompetent even for television; the presence of the ultra-sexy blonde makes things worse, constantly reminding you that the director is trying to distract you to make you overlook the overall picture. But instead, nothing happens, 50 minutes of tedium pass, with lines that would be out of place in a Disney Channel TV series, surreal situations and characters with neither head nor tail doing nonsensical things without repercussions. All condensed into a magnificent promotional video for the American Navy to the tunes of AC/DC. I'm not joking, for an hour there are alternating 5 minutes of nonsensical dialogues and 5 minutes of flashy shots of warships, complete with hard rock and music video style: enough to make you tear your eyes out with your nails.

If after an hour you still haven't deserted the room, it means the string of aperitifs you drank before entering is still holding you up. Enter the alien transformers, or thereabouts, gigantic, agile, and capable of flying, but they remain on the water's surface just to be hit by the ships' torpedoes (after all, the film promotes the navy, not the air force, who cares if the bad guys can fly if the screenwriter said they must stay on the water while fighting). Furthermore, the aliens are real gentlemen, they only attack when you point a weapon at them, just lower it, and they stop considering you a threat. One wonders how they survived on their planet.

Anyway, the film goes on squeezing some of those 200 million dollars into full-screen rendering, with the aliens, after taking out all the ships (except one, obviously, guess which!), launching metal testicles towards inhabited areas, killing tens of thousands of civilians. Or at least, that's what they say at the Pentagon (in the film it's ridiculously lit like the Galeries Lafayette at Christmas) because since the film cost a lot, the rate could only be PG13, meaning you won't see a single death scene despite the hundreds of great opportunities on the plate.

The show goes on with the entry of a legless soldier and the nerd who knows everything about the aliens' plans and technology (just because, he KNOWS), and in case they fell behind with the dismal lines and clichés due to the high number of explosions, here comes another generous helping to make up for lost time.

I don’t want to spoil too much in case you decide to subject yourself to this ordeal, but in the last half hour, the film grants more gems of idiocy and stupidity, among which an unlikely crew of elderly with walkers and a handbrake (or rather, an anchor!) made with a destroyer. When you think it's over, there are still 5 minutes with the protagonists taking photos to post on Facebook making faces and spouting unbearable lines. Liam Neeson closes in style with the cliché n° 3678765 of the film, ferrying this meaningless film to the end credits.

The only thing worse than a Michael Bay film is a film trying to be like a Michael Bay film, and failing even at that.