I just finished watching Battlefield right now, the movie with one surprisingly good/famous cast composed of Rihanna, Liam Neeson, Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skasgard and many others. I actually watched it for them. I am no fan of action movies, especially when aliens. I am still waiting to watch Prometheus and the Alien movies to draw my final conclusions on the genre, but normally they're just fake and have the same main plot and the subplots just don't matter. This one doesn't really fall far behind. You have ships, you have alien, overly-developed spaceships coming and planning on taking over the earth, you have one hero and you have the moments when everything is lost and then at the end they're all really fucking great, only one main character has died and the others have triumphed over whatever was holding them down, be it the physical threat of the extraterrestrial beings, be it some sort of character flaw they work through during the battle. It is always pre-designed and it is always the same. Kind of like an Aristotelic drama, in which there is one act for introduction, one act for action crescendo, one climax where everything goes to hell and back, one part where everything starts going well, one scare at the end that could doom everything or make it all much better, and either the triumph or the catastrophe, depending on the setting. Just translate this into the movie and you have every single action movie ever made, added with an excess of special effects and some bad subplots to keep people somehow rooting for the characters. The worst thing though? They normally keep my eyes glued to the screen because, although I can predict everything that's going to happen, you still end up rooting for them and wishing they win and cursing the bad guys. To me, that's one successfull action movie. Battleship attained this status, indeed. It was also somewhat different.
I thought Battleship was actually pretty nice because of the acting, hence the tittle of this entry.There's not much to be said about the story itself, although using the Navy may be quite new, as i haven't seen much of these alien movies with navy guys, normally it's the army or air force. And the special effects were overdosed, but when aren't they? I mean, I was pretty surprised by Rihanna using a Jamaican (I think) accent and slang and the stand of a tomboy because her public image is that of a party girl and there is really no way we could have seen she acted beforehand. She was good. I could say Raikes was one person and Rihanna another, there were no traits of the pop singer and that, in my opinion, is acting. And I could say Raikes was a pretty well-based character, which surprised me. Taylor Kitsch is awesome, I mean, the burrito part? Genius. Although I didn't feel much of his emotional conflict at the middle. I didn't sense much of a gradual, palatine change in his character. Instead, it was all of a sudden. He did a 180 and suddenly was awesome, like that. I was pretty inspired by Mik and Sam was not the usual bottle blond lover and their dynamic was nice. But the one who shined the most, for me, was the geek, Zapata, played by Hamish Linklater. I have a passion for nerds and he was just adorable and his quotes were the best, like: "Are you telling me E.T. wants to phone home?" and "Acquire courage... Acquire courage..." besides his very visual trembling when he was face to face with the alien. He was adorable and awesome and has just proved, to me at least, why nerds are the best ones. Just yeah.
I'm not much of an expert to say anything, though. I'm saying this because I just remembered my sociology teacher talking about people posting on blogs saying they knew everything about a topic when they knew nothing at all. I started feeling quite guilty afterwards. Just saying.
