Battleship

Imagine a boardroom in 2010 where executives are staring at a plastic blue grid, clutching handfuls of tiny red and white pegs, and deciding this is the foundation for a $209 million blockbuster. It’s the kind of peak-Hollywood hubris that only makes sense in that frantic window between the first Transformers and the arrival of The Avengers, a time when the industry was convinced that literally any brand with a pulse could be turned into a "Cinematic Universe." Looking back at Battleship today, it’s a fascinating, loud, and weirdly earnest relic of the "Big Hasbro" era—a film that treats a childhood board game with the same somber, military reverence most directors reserve for Black Hawk Down.

The High-Stakes Logic of Plastic Pegs

The plot is exactly as thin as it needs to be to justify two hours of metal grinding against metal. We’ve got Taylor Kitsch as Alex Hopper, a directionless screw-up who joins the Navy because his brother (Alexander Skarsgård, channeling a very stoic piece of driftwood) forces him to. Before you can say "Checkmate," or rather "B-4," NASA accidentally invites a fleet of spiky, water-skimming aliens to Hawaii. These invaders drop a massive forcefield over the Pacific, trapping a few destroyers inside a lethal game of hide-and-seek.

The CGI, handled by the wizards at Industrial Light & Magic, is surprisingly durable. While many 2012-era digital effects have started to look like PS3 cutscenes, the alien "shredders"—giant spinning wheels of doom—possess a weight and texture that still feels dangerous. Director Peter Berg (who did this as a "one for them" trade to get the gritty Lone Survivor financed) shoots the action with a frantic, handheld energy that masks the absurdity of the premise. I’ll never forget watching this on a laptop during a cross-country flight while the woman in the middle seat was aggressively knitting a neon green sweater, and even on a 13-inch screen, the scale of the explosions felt massive.

Action on the High Seas

What makes Battleship work as a cult curiosity is its absolute refusal to wink at the camera. It’s a film that takes its own stupidity with life-or-death seriousness, and there’s a strange charm in that. Take the middle act, where the heroes literally have to play the game of Battleship. Because their radar is down, they use water-displacement buoys to track the aliens on a grid. It should be the dumbest scene in cinema history, but with Steve Jablonsky’s booming, metallic score (which sounds like a washing machine full of wrenches) and the high-tension editing, it actually gets the pulse jumping.

Then there’s the cast. Taylor Kitsch was at the epicenter of a very specific 2012 moment where Hollywood tried to make him the world’s biggest star in a single summer between this and John Carter. He’s fine, but the real intrigue is Rihanna in her film debut as Petty Officer Raikes. She spends most of the movie yelling things like "Boom!" and "Mahalo, Motherf—er," and honestly, she fits the vibe perfectly. She’s not there to win an Oscar; she’s there to look cool while firing a massive machine gun at a mechanical alien. Even Liam Neeson shows up for about seven minutes of "Admiral scowling," likely earning enough in that time to buy a small island.

The USS Missouri and Cult Redemption

The final act is where Battleship transcends being a mere corporate product and enters the realm of "Did they really just do that?" To defeat the aliens, the young crew has to enlist a group of actual WWII veterans to help them start up the decommissioned USS Missouri. Watching a bunch of eighty-year-olds (who were real-life veterans, not just actors) help Tadanobu Asano and Taylor Kitsch "drift" a 45,000-ton battleship to the tune of AC/DC’s "Thunderstruck" is the cinematic equivalent of eating a deep-fried Twinkie. It’s greasy, it’s probably bad for you, but you can’t help but enjoy the sugar rush.

Apparently, the production was a logistical nightmare, involving filming on actual destroyers and the Missouri herself. Turns out, those "peg" weapons the aliens fire were a late design choice specifically to make the board game connection more literal. Also, the alien sound effects were partially created by recording a foley artist dragging a metal dumpster across a concrete driveway. It’s that kind of DIY ingenuity hidden inside a massive budget that gives the film its weird, clunky soul.

Ultimately, Battleship is a loud, proud recruitment ad for a game that uses plastic pegs that somehow managed to be more entertaining than it had any right to be. It’s the definition of a "checked-out Saturday" movie—something you put on when you want to see things blow up with high-fidelity sound design and zero intellectual demand. It captures that 2010s transition where CGI was becoming god-tier but scripts were still trying to figure out how to compete with the internet. If you can bypass the "why does this exist?" of it all, you’ll find a surprisingly competent action flick hiding under the hull.