Battlesh**

Forethoughts: The journey was made today to see Battleship at the cinema,  the fact that Rihanna was to be in the movie was forgotten but information came that morning about this fact through the internet. Maybe a recollection would come afterwards of where any of the film performers has been seen before. Of course the other big name in the movie is Taylor Kitsch, or perhaps he is not as big a name as that but he was lead actor of the movie John Carter of Mars that although it seemed like a marvelous spectacle, it didn't seem to do well in the box office , that film wasn't advertised very well and it appears as if its publicity had been deliberately sabotaged. A thought occurred that maybe half way through Battleship that Rihanna's presence would be forgotten even if she was in every other scene, perhaps she would have merged into the background.

Seeing the Movie: It felt like an enjoyable popcorn movie although this writer no longer eats popcorn and if you've play lots of videogames you might call it another videogame movie, but if you haven't you might not be totally familiar with the ways that lots of movies are becoming more and more like videogames. This film was almost a kind of nightmarish dream that you'd get if you had been eating cheese too late at night which might it a little like the third of Bay's Transformers movies which seemed very much a strange nightmare vision.

  

Before the main battle of the film, the movie threatened to become a cluelessly awful comedy but everything turned around before it could go too far that way. Quite honestly no clue came forth as to what was going to happen next, maybe too at the end it started to get sillier in the final part of the battle. Happiness came because they didn't focus too much on the alien monsters faces, they looked better with their helmets on, their faces looked too much like CGI representations of Carlos Huantes style ogres or like some strange entities from a copy of the 2000 AD comic book. One thing that seemed cheap was the scene where they boarded the exterior of the alien vessel and close up it looked like a structure made from fibreglass and the sound of the feet on the structure made it sound as if it could easily be fibreglass as well.

It certainly was the same Alien Invasion concept that that we have been introduced to multiple times in the last year or so as in Battle: Los Angeles, they had to stop them from transmitting back home to bring more aliens to Earth, but the big difference was that this one was at sea.  In a way it was likeable  so much that a sequel would be welcome.

The film's human element which it had running through it was a love story in which Taylor Kitsch's character had fallen in love with the daughter of an admiral played by Liam Neason and it's only through facing the ultimate test of manhood by taking command of a destroyer ship and fight against a fleet of alien spacecrafts that leap about the surface of the ocean, while also teaming up. It was as if Taylor Kitsch's character finding himself in the captain's seat had to suddenly transform into a Captain Kirk style hero.  Captain Nagata his initial enemy who is there for the purpose of performing as the enemy in a naval exercise, finds himself putting their differences aside and soon he reveals his own culture's battle tactics that helps them save the day and make it look as if they're playing the game of Battleship during the film.

Rihanna when she just played a background character worked well, but as soon as she was brought to the forefront, it looked as if she was a little bit on the wooden side , totally out of place and they didn't quite know what to do with her but she had to be in the scene whatever the costs, perhaps at such times she could have been replaced with an animatronics or CGI puppet but perhaps they managed to coax a good performance out of her a fair amount of the time, and in future movies film makers will find better ways to use her without without trying to stick her in as many scenes as possible to make her pop music fans feel as if they've seen her in the movie enough or a CGI and animatronics will develop a better replacement.

You're likely to be sitting there in your cinema seat in a state of shell shock getting hit by the experience of one explosion after another and one scene of wreckage or mass destruction after another, the dialogue wasn't so tedious as a film such as Battle Los: Angeles where
continuous prayers went out for more background sound to blot out nearly everything that was uttered. Here the dialogue flowed mostly well, the film director seemed much more geared towards making Michael Bay style movies .  Probably the special effects showed that the producers of Transformers had a big hand in it but at the same time a good many fresh faces there amongst the cast.

After Thoughts: It's not as if anyone was supposed to take the film seriously, was anyone really ever hoping that they were going to make a movie about the Battleship game, there have been some fine naval battle movies in the past, maybe no one exactly asked for a new one, so the director may as well go ahead and make a science fiction movie out of this title. Perhaps the film maker ought to have made the enemy beings into time travellers or life forms from a parallel universe rather than more extra-terrestrials. But this writer quite liked it, he's drawn to these alien invasion movies, it was quite a thrilling ride, there were some great scenes some good design,, maybe the DVD will be buyable this writer doubts that he could expect any of his friends to want to go and see it, some members of the audience in the auditorium where he saw it thought it was rubbish. but he gives it six out of ten.