Battleship is a movie about a naval war game turned into a real battle, and it spends almost its entire runtime proving that idea should have stayed a premise. The film, directed by Peter Berg, takes the simple concept of a fleet of ships being destroyed by alien forces and builds a $200 million production around it. What comes out is a film that understands spectacle better than it understands storytelling, and spectacle is not enough to carry a running time this long.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
The Premise
The setup is straightforward. A group of aliens, looking like giant metal robots, arrive over the Pacific Ocean and drop into the water. They target a military exercise called Battleship, turning it into a live engagement. The U.S. Navy, led by Admiral Stavros Sykes (Liam Neeson), has to fight back while trying to communicate with the invaders and figure out why they are here. The stakes are global, and the film wants you to believe that a naval war is the kind of threat that could bring down the whole world.
It sounds like a pitch for a tense, smart thriller. It plays out as a loud, repetitive action movie that forgets why we care about any of it.
The Cast
The cast is large and talented, and the film wastes most of them. Taylor Kitsch plays Lt. Commander Stone, the officer who leads the ship that gets targeted. Rihanna plays Petty Officer Sands, a weapons expert who gets dragged into the fight. Alexander Skarsgård plays Steve, a civilian contractor who finds himself on the wrong side of the ocean when the aliens arrive. The film also features Brooklyn Decker, Tadanobu Asano, and Josh Lucas, but none of them get enough material to justify their presence.
Liam Neeson shows up as the Admiral, and he is the closest thing the film has to a strong performance. He is gruff, commanding, and believable as a leader under fire. The problem is that the script gives him little to say beyond “get ready” and “hold the line.” The rest of the cast is left to react to explosions and run from gunfire, and the result is a film that feels less like a drama and more like a series of set pieces with actors attached to them.
The Battle Scenes
The battle scenes are where Battleship earns its budget. The ships are massive, the explosions are bright, and the sound design is thunderous. There are moments where the film captures the chaos of a naval engagement, with ships firing and dodging and falling apart in the water. These sequences are technically proficient, and they look expensive. They are also, almost always, empty of meaning.
The aliens move through the water like machines, and the film treats them as obstacles rather than characters. There is no attempt to explain their motives, their history, or their connection to Earth. They are simply there to destroy things, and the film does not seem interested in asking why. That lack of curiosity is a problem when the entire plot hinges on communication with the enemy. If the film cannot answer the question of why they are here, it has no business asking us to care about the answers.
The Romance
The film tries to ground the action in a love story, and it fails spectacularly. Rihanna and Kitsch are supposed to be the romantic leads, and their scenes together are meant to humanize the conflict. Instead, they become a running joke about how badly the film handles intimacy. The romance is rushed, poorly written, and undercut by the sheer volume of destruction happening around them.
There is a scene where they kiss on a sinking ship, and the moment is supposed to be tender. It lands as absurd, because the ship is exploding behind them and the world is ending. The film cannot decide whether it wants to be a serious war movie or a summer romance, and it ends up being neither. The result is a story that lacks emotional weight and a relationship that feels like a placeholder between action sequences.
The Writing
The script, by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Travis Nicole Fisher, is competent but unimaginative. It knows how to stage a battle, but it does not know how to build a character or a conversation. The dialogue is flat, the motivations are vague, and the resolution is a cop-out. The film introduces a clever idea about the aliens targeting Battleship, but it never follows through on what that means. By the end, the plot feels like a series of events rather than a coherent story.
The film also suffers from a pacing problem. At 131 minutes, it should move quickly, but it drags in the middle. There are stretches where the camera watches ships fire at each other for what feels like five minutes, and the tension evaporates because the film is not doing anything new. The action is repetitive, and the editing does not help. The film cuts between multiple ships, multiple angles, and multiple explosions, but it never lets the audience catch a breath.
The Sound
The sound design deserves credit. The explosions are loud, the gunfire is sharp, and the alien movement is accompanied by a low, mechanical hum. The film knows how to make a battlefield feel dangerous, even when the danger is not earned. The music, by Brian Tyler, is bombastic and overdone, but it fits the tone. This is a film that wants to be loud, and it succeeds at being loud.
That success is not the same as being good.
The Verdict
Battleship is not a bad movie. It is not a good one either. It is a film that takes a promising premise and buries it under too much noise. The aliens are a missed opportunity, the romance is a waste, and the action is too loud to be thrilling. The film is entertaining in short bursts, but it loses focus over its full length. It is the kind of movie that you watch and forget as soon as it ends.
The film’s failure is not a failure of ambition. It is a failure of execution. The filmmakers had a clear idea of what they wanted to make, but they could not connect the pieces. The result is a film that is big, shiny, and hollow.
Key Facts Box
– Title: Battleship
– Director: Peter Berg
– Runtime: 131 minutes
– Budget: $200 million
– Score: 4.1/10
- Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Rihanna, Alexander Skarsgård, Liam Neeson
- Released: 2012
- Premise: Aliens target a naval exercise off the coast of Hawaii
The film is best enjoyed as a curiosity. It is a reminder of what a blockbuster can be when it prioritizes spectacle over substance. It is not a film to take seriously, but it is a film that asks to be taken seriously, and that gap is its downfall. Battleship is a failure of ambition, not of intent. It wanted to be a great movie, and it settled for being a loud one.
The final score is 4.1/10.
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