Battleship

I just sat down to write a review of the movie I saw last week, then spent a good ten seconds searching my memory to recall which movie it was.

Either I'm getting old or I saw Battleship.

Here's the setup: blah blah blah, high-spirited naval officer needs to mature and hey I think I'll do the dishes, aliens and something and some ships, blah blah blah, a bunch of SWO stuff and I might as well pick up the toys and straighten the bookshelves, and hey, what's this?  The mighty USS Missouri putting out to sea to attack some interstellar bad guys?  *Now* you have my attention.  Too bad it's already the third act.

I'm not joking.  I have almost zero recollection of anything that happens before the third act.  And I watched the whole movie (and did the dishes, and picked up around the living room, and straightened the bookshelves).  My three boys, including the one who begged me to let him stay up last night to finish watching Vincent Price in The House on Haunted Hill, wandered off sometime during the leadup to the second-act crisis.  But once that third act hit and the Mo got underway, the red in my veins turned to blue and gold and I planted myself on that couch.  What followed was hot, hot battleship action, with the 16-inch guns booming and the captain on the bridge wing calling the shots and the ship itself doing things I'm pretty sure no battleship can actually do, but that looked really cool.  I'm tellin' ya, if you like Navy stuff, you'll love the last act of Battleship.  Better yet, if you're a USNA '92 grad, you'll love the denoument even more.  Our very own Chad Muse, all-around great guy and the very first person I hope to see if I ever get rolled up somewhere out there, makes an appearance and even gets a few lines.  He offers the hero, established as the SWO (Surface Warfare Officer) of SWOs, the ultimate reward for saving the world: a ticket out of the SWO community.  It's beautiful, man.

So there you have it.  Wait for Battleship to hit instant, fast-forward 'til the Mo shows up, then enjoy.  It's a great 30 minutes at the movies.

John Carter

I was all set to give John Carter a fair shot.  I like and respect the previous work of its director, Andrew Stanton, I’m always up for a science fiction adventure, and the love interest is pretty.  For its part, John Carter did its best to wow me.  It had all the elements of an exciting story, it introduced cool creatures and civilizations, and it ended in a rousing battle of good vs. evil.  Unfortunately, the film felt flat.  It put me off right at the beginning, and I never could bring myself to invest in what was happening onscreen.

John Carter begins with two false starts.  They make sense by the time the closing credits roll, but they made me hesitate to commit once the main story got underway.  Once the story does get moving, we’re introduced to the eponymous Carter, realize it’s a year or two after the close of the Civil War, and learn that Carter was a Confederate cavalry officer in that war.  Judging by his conduct toward the U.S. Army officer who wants his help for something, we gather that he has a deep hatred for the Union and the soldiers who fought for it.

Ok, you lost me right there.  The Confederate cause, which they labeled “states’ rights,” was actually the right of states not only to choose to enslave human beings, but to extend the Peculiar Institution to newly chartered states and territories.  Screw anyone and everyone who was on board with that program.  [Personal aside #1: I have children in Florida public schools.  The Ellermann family position on the Civil War does not go over well.]  [Personal aside #2: I can’t wait to leave.]  John Carter didn’t bother to give its protagonist exculpatory dialogue, so I began the story in opposition to him.  When he finds himself on Mars and clapped into chains, I thought, “Serves him right.”

Dominic West, whom everyone who has seen ‘The Wire’ thinks is a great guy, plays the antagonist.  He’s a Martian warlord who’s supposed to be really evil, but is no more evil than any number of other conquerors in history.  Had John Carter allowed him to Rickman it up and have some fun, we might have enjoyed him.  He plays the material straight, however, which made our only grounds for opposition the fact that he meant to unify his planet. 

Unfortunately, I never had a reason to oppose his conquest beyond a general sense of “conquest is bad.”  The “good guy” city-state, led by the great Ciaran Hinds and represented by the remarkably attractive Lynn Collins, didn’t show me why it was better than Westville.  In fact, it was led by a moron and had a princess who was willing to sacrifice untold numbers of her subjects’ lives to avoid marrying someone she didn’t like because “that’s no way to live.”  Sure thing, lady.  Tell it to the widows and orphans of the men you sacrificed on the altar of your quality of life.  The other sentient race we met, which also feared Western domination, was brutish and nasty and could have used a little Baltimore justice.

And away we go, I guess.  John Carter does a fish-out-of water thing when Carter first arrives on the planet, then kicks over to a reluctant hero narrative with space monsters and a princess whose costume design could have used a little more Frazetta and little less drapery.  It has sword fights and laser beams and betrayals and heroics and all the hallmarks of a grand adventure, but I never had a dog in the fight.

I’ve seen Stanton run rings around stories like this in Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and WALL-E. Next time around, here’s hoping he returns to form and gives us heroes we can root for, villains we can love to hate, an adventure we can get into, and some depth of meaning.  Unfortunately, John Carter simply does not deliver.