Battleship the Movie – Will it sink?

I don’t know about you, but when I heard they were making a Battleship movie based off of the famous board game I rolled my eyes big time. I was very skeptical.

On one hand I love the idea of taking fun family board games to the big screen. What a great way to promote a fun family pastime. Make a great movie and get people interested in playing fun games with their families again.

On the other hand however, I thought it might be just a ploy to take advantage of a familiar brand to make a lot of money. And if that’s the point in making something, it typically doesn’t turn out very good. Instead it may turn out to be just a very expensive ad campaign.

With those ideas in mind, I was anxious to see the movie trailer and get a feel for what the movie might be about. The first teaser trailer seemed ok and I thought they might be able to make something of the movie. But after seeing alien ships appear in the next trailer, I almost burst out laughing. Kind of like I did when I first saw the trailer and name for the movie “Cowboys & Aliens”. I guess movie makers think all they have to do to drum up interest is throw in aliens. Bad move.

So the skepticism took center stage and I didn’t make any plans to spend hard-earned cash on going to see “Battleship” the movie. Sure I love to see movies with great special effects that carry me away for a couple hours in a darkened theater with a huge screen and loud sound. But I also like movies to have good characters and plots to be swept away with.

So I wasn’t surprised at all when I saw the review headline in the paper Friday, “’Battleship’ will be the dumbest movie of the summer”. According to this reviewer, the movie Battleship is what I’d worried about all along. A movie tall on effects but short on substance.

Guess if I had put Battleship on my list of movies to go see, I could cross it off. But since it never solidified itself on that list, I can save myself the time.

Instead I’ll do what I had hoped the movie would engender with families around the world in the first place and just pull our copy of Battleship off the self, dust it off, and play a few games with the kids. That will be a much better use of my time anyway.