Battleship -2012-2012 -
If you typed the search query into a search bar, you are likely not looking for a release date. You are using Boolean logic to strip away the obvious—the year of release—to uncover the deeper, stranger, and more fascinating history of the 2012 film Battleship . You want to know about the $209 million spectacle without being told, for the hundredth time, that it came out "in 2012."
The sequence of the Missouri awakening is the film’s undeniable masterpiece. A retired veteran, who served on the ship in the 1980s, sneaks aboard to help. As the alien warships close in, the veterans start the engines. The camera pans over the massive 16-inch (406 mm) guns. An old sailor, played by real-life veteran and actor Gregory D. Gadson (an Army colonel who lost both legs in Iraq), orders: "Load the guns." Battleship -2012-2012
What it is, is a beautiful, stupid, earnest, loud, and deeply sincere monument to a very specific era of blockbuster filmmaking. It is a movie where a slacker learns to be a leader, where an old battleship outruns physics, and where the final solution to an alien invasion involves turning off GPS and using a compass. If you typed the search query into a
Kitsch plays Lieutenant Alex Hopper, a reckless, directionless slacker who joins the Navy after a humiliating attempt to steal a chicken burrito for a girl (Brooklyn Decker). This opening sequence—the "burrito incident"—has become legendary in its own right. It is, by all accounts, the most jarring tonal shift in modern blockbuster history. One minute you are watching a romantic comedy about a man-child; the next, you are watching a naval officer sacrifice himself to save humanity. A retired veteran, who served on the ship
Director Peter Berg has publicly stated that he cast Kitsch because he saw the same raw, bruising charisma that made actors like a young Mel Gibson famous. The film asks Kitsch to transform from a punchline into a Patton-esque strategist in under 90 minutes. Does he succeed? That depends on your tolerance for earnestness.
