On the Monday of
last week, when announcing the weekend box office results, newspaper style
sections and entertainment websites all had the words “Avengers
crushes Battleship” or some
variant thereof splashed across their headlines. More specifically, despite
having been in theaters for three weeks, Joss Whedon’s superhero phenomenon had
outlasted Peter Berg’s Transformer-like action tentpole to retain its
spot atop the box office, earning a whopping 30 million dollars more than the
latter, which had to settle for second place. This news
wasn’t exactly unexpected, considering the hysteria that has surrounded Avengers
since its release (at this rate, it’s likely to surpass The Dark Knight
in all-time domestic grosses), but I still couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of
relief upon seeing it.
No, I haven’t
seen Battleship, and frankly, I don’t plan on doing so unless I’m
stranded at home one day with a hundred-degree fever. But this blog
post/rant/tentative expression of hope has nothing to do with the film’s
quality; for all I know, it could actually be the rousing, engaging, and
emotionally complex action war picture that Entertainment
Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum claims it to be,
though I somehow can’t bring myself to believe her (I like you, Lisa, and your
reviews are exquisitely written, but there’s no way you can be
“depressed” by The Avengers and have no problem whatsoever with Battleship).
I don’t normally take
pleasure in the misfortune of others (or maybe
I do), and I’m sure tons of people worked their asses off on this movie and
deserve their paychecks, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the failure of Battleship
gives me a smidgeon of hope for the future of human civilization.
At the end of the
day, the fact is that no matter how fun or surprisingly well-made Battleship
is, it’s still a $200 million movie based on a fifty-year-old board game. Is
Hollywood really so creatively drained that it needs to create movies out of board
games? Or is it just so lazy that it no longer considers plot an essential
element of storytelling? Transformers may be a hollow, cacophonous mess
of a franchise, as insubstantial as the CGI explosions that seem to encompass
its entirety, but at least you could argue that it’s based on a TV show with an
actual narrative.
Not that you can’t still turn it into an incoherent jumble of giant
robots beating the [metal] out of each other
In other words, Battleship
is Transformers, minus even the pretense of wanting to be a legitimate
movie. This isn’t art or entertainment: it’s a commodity. Why else would the trailer proudly declare,
“From Hasbro, the company that brought you Transformers” instead of,
“From the director of Hancock and Friday Night Lights” like most
movie trailers? Regardless of whether Battleship happens to succeed as
an escapist action spectacle (and, according to Rotten Tomatoes, 66% of critics
say it doesn’t), it probably isn’t a stretch to say that few people behind the
scenes give a damn about the actual quality of the film, as long as it vomits
out a boatload of cash (pun intended) from unsuspecting international audiences
– apparently, homicidal aliens and deafening explosions are universal, whereas
genuine human emotion is not.
You might say, “Isn’t that the point of
blockbusters? To make money?” And you’d be mostly right. But there’s a
difference between investing money in something because you think it has the
potential to be good/successful and just flinging money at the screen and
hoping it sticks. Battleship isn’t a film so much as a compilation of
various stock elements cobbled together, designed to push the buttons of a
specific demographic. I can easily imagine that the pitch for Battleship
went something like this:
Executive #1: Hey, you know how people like Transformers?
Executive #2: Yeah…
Executive #1: What if we did Transformers, but – get this – instead of
robots, we have aliens?
Executive #2: Alright, go on…
Executive #1: And we could get one of those pretty-boy actors, like Taylor
Kitsch or somebody. For the women, you know?
Executive #2: Sure. What about brand
name? We need a brand name.
Executive #1: How about… Battleship?
Yeah, that’s it!
Executive #2: Battleship? Wait,
what?
Executive #1: Yeah! Lots of people like
that game, right?
Executive #2: Um…
Executive #1: Just go with it, will you?
Oh,
did I mention that shit blows up?
Ironically, even
as movie budgets have inflated exponentially, the movies themselves often feel
as cheap and disposable as ever. At its core, what is Battleship really
but an insanely expensive Syfy original? Take a cheesy monster plot, throw in a
few blandly attractive actors, expensive special effects and a flimsy message
about patriotism and voila! You’ve got Battleship. I don’t know about
anyone else, though, but I don’t find anything particularly compelling about
wall-to-wall eye candy and dazzling visuals if there’s no substance or weight
beneath all the flash. If I wanted to ogle pretty things, I could stare at my
desktop background for two hours. Moreover, in the case of Battleship,
the name recognition doesn’t actually mean anything. This isn’t like The
Avengers or The Hobbit, where fans of the source material have been
eagerly anticipating the big screen version for months, even years, hoping
against hope that it lives up to their lofty expectations. I can personally
guarantee you that no one has ever played the game Battleship© and thought, “I
wonder what this would be like as a full-length movie.”
The line between
the creative and business sides of the entertainment industry is disturbingly
hazy nowadays. Just look at the sheer number of sequels, prequels, spin-offs,
etc. Chances are, the majority of them exist not because anyone thinks they’re
necessary, a natural extension of the original story, but because it’s easier
to sell something that people are already familiar with than to introduce an
entirely new concept. Now more than ever, films live and die by their
marketing. This is an era in which we not only get an endless series of
trailers for each movie, but also trailers for trailers – essentially
advertisements for advertisements – and the debut of one-sheet posters is
considered “news”. I’ll admit that I can get caught up in marketing campaigns
for movies (I’m one of those people that feels obligated to watch the trailers
that play before movies in theaters), and genius campaigns like the ones for District
9 and Prometheus (excluding the teaser-for-the-trailer part) can be
works of art on their own, but at a certain point, there is such a thing as too
much hype. And this isn’t confined to the movie industry: many singers are
pigeonholed into a specific genre so people know where to find them in record
stores, and network TV makes virtually all of its decisions based on finances,
almost always rewarding popularity or marketability over quality and
creativity. Yes, I know that this is and always will be a business, but when
the need to make a profit constantly compromises the art itself, when it feels
as though movies are being created by marketing teams rather than writers and film-makers,
I think there’s sufficient cause for concern.
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