By late August 2010, Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson, Alexander Skarsgård, Rihanna, Tadanobu Asano, Jesse Plemons, Josh Pence, and Rami Malek were cast in a loose adaptation of the well-known board game of the same name written by Jon and Erich Hoeber, and with Berg as director. At the same time, principal photography commenced, and took place in O'ahu, Hawaii; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; San Antonio, Texas; Los Angeles and San Diego, California; Hong Kong, China; and Auckland, New Zealand. The film was to begin filming in Australia's Gold Coast, but the production changed location due to a lack of Australian government tax incentives and a high estimated budget of $220 million.
The film stars Kitsch, Neeson, Skarsgård, Rihanna, Asano, Plemons, Pence, and Malek. Each of the cast were punishingly boring.
It's not that Berg's vision for the robot-battle choreography is unimaginative. Rather, he lacks imagination to provide viewers with a way of putting all the pieces together for themselves. That was delivered will no doubt send merchandising sales spiralling into orbit, but sadly at the cost of countless brain cells popping through after nearly two and a half hours of tedium. The film delivers on its promise of stunning visuals and well-crafted action sequences, but it's not remotely worth the slog it takes to get there. Once the novelty of the robots wears off it's hopelessly insipid. Morphs from Army-enlisting ad to toy ad (on its way passing through a panoply of car ads, computer ads, beer ads) without ever becoming a movie. For the bot-neutral rest of us, two-and-a-half hours of mostly incoherent special effects may be a bit much. Come to think of it, I was pretty stupid when I was six years old. So is this film. Producer Michael Bay's bigger than life version of the cartoon I grew up loving pretty much ruined one of my favourite childhood memories. Although it strives to appeal to the whole family, it winds up emerging as a kiddie flick on steroids - a big-budget, effects heavy, feature film version of a Saturday morning cartoon. The film is a loud, unsophisticated testament to the visceral thrills of effects-driven mayhem. A sensory attack that drives us into tiny little fetal balls on the ground, whimpering that we must have liked it because the car effects looked cool. The film goes on and on, it is unbearably loud, and much of the dialogue is impossible to hear. Like Bay, Berg's notion of excitement is to smash up bunches of stuff on screen, with no rhyme or reason, no characters to care about, and no clarity or structure to the action.
Simon says Battleship receives:
It's not that Berg's vision for the robot-battle choreography is unimaginative. Rather, he lacks imagination to provide viewers with a way of putting all the pieces together for themselves. That was delivered will no doubt send merchandising sales spiralling into orbit, but sadly at the cost of countless brain cells popping through after nearly two and a half hours of tedium. The film delivers on its promise of stunning visuals and well-crafted action sequences, but it's not remotely worth the slog it takes to get there. Once the novelty of the robots wears off it's hopelessly insipid. Morphs from Army-enlisting ad to toy ad (on its way passing through a panoply of car ads, computer ads, beer ads) without ever becoming a movie. For the bot-neutral rest of us, two-and-a-half hours of mostly incoherent special effects may be a bit much. Come to think of it, I was pretty stupid when I was six years old. So is this film. Producer Michael Bay's bigger than life version of the cartoon I grew up loving pretty much ruined one of my favourite childhood memories. Although it strives to appeal to the whole family, it winds up emerging as a kiddie flick on steroids - a big-budget, effects heavy, feature film version of a Saturday morning cartoon. The film is a loud, unsophisticated testament to the visceral thrills of effects-driven mayhem. A sensory attack that drives us into tiny little fetal balls on the ground, whimpering that we must have liked it because the car effects looked cool. The film goes on and on, it is unbearably loud, and much of the dialogue is impossible to hear. Like Bay, Berg's notion of excitement is to smash up bunches of stuff on screen, with no rhyme or reason, no characters to care about, and no clarity or structure to the action.
Simon says Battleship receives:
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