Battleship (2012)

  I chose this poster so that I could pretend this was actually a HALO movie, not a Hasbro one.

Rob and Christy don't like me very much.  I've come to this determination after Rob chose this monstrosity for his movie pick of the week.  Maybe he was just trying to outdo Christy's Breaking Dawn trainwreck.  Who can say? 

This movie is awful.  It just skimps out on so-awful-it's-good, though.  A little more camp and it could have been a great guilty pleasure but it just doesn't measure up. 

In 2006, scientists started bouncing radio waves at a distant earth-like planet.  Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) is a loser who gets tazed trying to get the girl of his dreams (Brooklyn Decker) a chicken burrito.  Pissed, his brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgaard) orders him to join the Navy.  Because that works. 

Well, after six years of us metaphorically leaning on their doorbell, aliens show up off the coast of Hawaii and crash into the Pacific.  Alex and his brother are still there, because no one ever moves in the Navy, happily engaging in a soccer game with the Japanese during RIMPAC.  Alex is trying to find a way to ask Dream Girl's scary admiral dad (Liam Neeson) for her hand, because of course he totally wound up with her after getting tazed on her behalf ladies love that, but he keeps fucking up spectacularly. 

The aliens set up a perimeter force field that encompasses the entire main chian of Hawaiian islands, dividing five ships with main characters on them from the rest of the fleet.  Alex does pretty much everything he can to antagonize the aliens.  One can only assume he is actually a mole for them, so ready is he to sacrifice the lives of all the other humans inside the force field.  A less suicidal Chief (John Tui) finally convinces him to stop being a douche.  The aliens immediately ignore the ship as a non-combatant, which would lead you to believe that maybe they're not genocidal, they just got off on the wrong foot.  Oh, but no, using an old Independence Day trick, a captured alien turns out to be about 99% less dead than previously thought and confirms that they want nothing less than the total destruction of the Earth by passing along a psychic message to Alex while grabbing him by the skull and screaming a lot.  Typical.

Some stunning leaps of logic later, the humans have learned that the aliens' eyes are sensitive to sunlight and that their ships don't show up on radar.  The Japanese commander (Tadanobu Asano) devises a plan to use the water displacement from tsunami buoys to guess where the aliens will be.  This is the most beautiful justification for calling out grid squares (a la the titular board game) I have ever heard.  That doesn't make it any less retarded, though. 

Honestly, this was a shitty film that the director did so he could afford to do the movie he really wanted, a SEAL drama called Lone Survivor.  I'm not even gong to hate on him for that.  I'm sure people have done worse for a paycheck.  What I would have liked to have seen, however, is the aliens' side to this story.  Hell, for all we know, that radio signal could have been saying YARD SALE in their language.  Then they come here looking for some Antiques Roadshow kind of finds, lose their communications ship due to a carelessly placed satellite, and are just trying to call someone to come pick them up.  Then they're attacked by humans, like fire ants defending a nest.  But no matter how many ants you squish, you're eventually going to get swarmed and die alone, milliions of miles away from your planet and loved ones.  That's some tragic and compelling shit right there.  Someone make that movie.  I could win an Oscar.