It can't be a spoiler if there is no plot to begin with...

Last night my "book club" took a field trip. In case you are new here, my "book club" at one time DID read and discuss actual books, but at some point we switched to watching TV shows instead, and instead of barely meeting once a month we upped it to once a week and attendance is better than ever now. We mostly rally around True Blood, but when that is on hiatus we try other strange combos of gratuitous ab-shots and paranormal tangents, such as Walking Dead, Spartacus, and Sherlock Holmes. Usually followed by an episode or two of Wipeout or American Ninja Warrior. While I still maintain the "book club" moniker, others have dubbed it "art film night."

So clearly "willing suspension of disbelief" is not a problem for us, everything we watch (and often discuss quite scholarly) is strange and absurd (even the reality shows) and yet, last night, I think we hit on the most unbelievable of all...

Battleship.



O.M.G.

I cannot even completely fathom what I just watched. And it's not the aliens that are throwing me. I'm tangentially okay with aliens, though I always prefer they don't show them directly (it's easier to believe if they're sort of imaginary still, like a book, and usually scarier) and of course when they DO show the aliens, you start deciding if that jives with your own idea of aliens, and questioning the special effects, and it just snowballs. Aliens should be implied, not fully exposed. And let's not even wonder why a movie based on a board game decided to work in aliens. This just happened. And it was potentially the MOST believable part of the movie.

More believable by far than Taylor Kitsch's character falling through the roof of a convenience store (twice) in order to impress a chick with a burrito, and then being tased (twice also). And then joining the navy, being assigned to the same area as his brother, and being made captain of the competitive soccer team.

More believable than the flattest sea imaginable with nary a wave (let alone a tsunami) despite bombs, huge spaceships, and other sky-scraper-sized debris plunging into it at a high rate of speed.



Probably more believable than Rhianna in the navy.

Definitely more believable than a crew of WWII vets helping to arm the floating museum that was once a battleship and taking it to war (with a Japanese captain nonetheless!) no questions asked.

Yeah, that last one is where the uncontrollable laughter really overwhelmed the levies and we all pretty much lost it. I have a hard time believing they could have written or filmed that "plot twist" with a straight face. I really liked Armageddon, but this was like an SNL parody of that...only serious? I expected to hear Aerosmith at any moment (and would have probably died of laughter if that had really happened).

I'm also a fan of the Friday Night Lights series, but it seemed to me that Riggins was playing Riggins and Landry was playing Landry...I am pretty sure we only went to see the movie in the first place because of Alexander Skarsgard, who they killed off much too soon (so soon we kept wondering when he would pop up again).

There were 20 minutes of bad action-flick previews, so we knew we were in for something outside of our demographic, but I don't think words can accurately convey just how laughable this movie was. I actually had a great night and was fully entertained, but I can't help but believe that was NOT the intention.

I suggest seeing this movie in an empty theatre so you can "MST3000" it. It's almost impossible to keep quiet and watch.

Oh, and Kitsch, I'm worried about you...first John Carter is a box office joke and now this bomb...I want to cheer for you, I really do, but you make it so hard...

Look! A whole post without mentioning TC!