Battleship is a strange movie.
Here is a film that is based on a board game, centered around guessing where the other player has positioned their battleships. I’ve played it a lot, we had an electronic version as a kid that made crunchy explosion noises, it was pretty fun. But while the board game is about two opposing armies throwing shots at each other, the film is instead about fighting off an alien invasion. It’s a strange twist, and while it speaks to the inherent difficulty of adapting a board game to the big screen, one wonders why in doing so, they decided to abandon most of their source material.
It probably would have been better received if it wasn’t called Battleship, because that set up several expectations. One, from the Battleship purists, is that it would be a military movie about finding hard to locate boats. Two, from most people, that it would be bad since it’s a film adaptation of a board game. Three, and this one they delivered on, would be that at least one weapon would be the pegs used in the game.
Instead of hard to locate boats, it was hard to locate aliens trying to connect to a satellite relay, so the purists were angry. Since everyone assumed it was bad, it was a box office failure. And since the pegs are an incredibly silly weapon, people laughed at that. The result is that Battleship was a failure and is destined to live in obscurity.
Clearly, I’ve had some sort of mental break, because I’m talking about Battleship in 2020, a year where a bunch of other stuff is happening. But I have decided to talk about this film not only because I had a strange desire to watch it over the weekend, but because it is something frivolous, stupid and not at all important.
In a time when everything seems to be going nuts, that escapism feels vital. Battleship is a movie you don’t have to care about. There aren’t any grand implications, it’s not a call to arms or something all that meaningful. While I’m not the kind of person who watches a film to ‘turn my brain off’ - inevitably, I think about all the films I watch a great deal, whether they’re good or bad, important or frivolous - I did watch this one entirely because I expected it to be a bit silly and I expected something in it that was unintentionally funny - and I got it when they drifted the ancient battleship like it was in a Fast and Furious movie.
People are turning to things like that a lot. People are making silly videos of themselves dancing. People are making dumb jokes to each other over social media. When just going out to the store is presented as a potentially life-risking endeavor, it’s important to have things that don’t matter.
There’s plenty of pressure to focus on things that are important. The world situation, the impact it’s going to have on our lives going forward, and how we can protect ourselves and our families. At a certain point, it’s healthy to give yourself a break and not think about important, weighty topics, and instead think about why the aliens in Battleship didn’t have the technology to give themselves sun-blocking contact lenses. Give yourself a few hours to think about something that is not remotely important.
Battleship is not important, the world doesn’t hinge on it - even if the plot of Battleship is about saving the world. There’s nothing that matters less than Battleship, and that’s why I decided to focus on it this week. Because, honestly, we all need something completely irrelevant.
