Peter Berg
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The plot sounds like a combination of “Independence Day,” “Armageddon” and “Transformers,” and in many ways, this film tries to replicate the formula that made those three pictures massively successful.
Nevertheless, for a film based on an outdated board game, “Battleship” delivers a nice balance of action and humor that reminded me a lot of another alien invasion movie, “Independence Day.” It’s probably more on par with the first “ Transformers ” than the Roland Emmerich sci-fi classic, but the sheer fact that it's entertaining at all makes “Battleship” more of a hit than a miss.
Simply put, if you have a hankering for a mindless two-hours plus of a movie that combines elements of that along with familiar bits of the "Transformers" films and "Independence Day," you could do far worse than what's offered here.
The script by Erich and Jon Hoeber get away with setting a naval battle at Pearl Harbor by teaming up the Japanese and the Americans against a shared enemy, but they still err just a little too much on humanizing the inhuman villains-- we can deal with either anonymously evil aliens (Independence Day style) or oddly sympathetic ones (District 9 style), but not some middling combination of the two.
There are small moments where the movie achieves the kind of dopey fun Roland Emmerich delivered in Independence Day.
Whereas a movie like Independence Day (in all its cheese) told a globe-hopping story with enough time to take a breath and get to know the people being blown up, Battleship spends over two hours (over two hours!) doing exactly one thing: lobbing explosives back and forth.
Director Peter Berg has crafted an almost fetishistic homage to Michael Bay — like Bay's "Transformers" series, this is yet another action extravaganza inspired by a Hasbro product — with its epic set pieces, swaggering bravado, panoramic skies and cheesy romance.
Peter Berg has crafted a carbon copy of the Transformers series, though while it passes on Michael Bay’s lewd shot portrayal of women, it can’t boast the raw thrills of the first movie either.
The plot sounds like a combination of “Independence Day,” “Armageddon” and “Transformers,” and in many ways, this film tries to replicate the formula that made those three pictures massively successful.
The overuse of generic computer-generated special effects - ie this stuff feels like leftovers from the Transformers series - ensures that the myriad of battle sequences are akin to video game cut scenes, with the resulting absence of context or excitement playing an integral role in the movie's astonishing (and palpable) downfall.
Nevertheless, for a film based on an outdated board game, “Battleship” delivers a nice balance of action and humor that reminded me a lot of another alien invasion movie, “Independence Day.” It’s probably more on par with the first “ Transformers ” than the Roland Emmerich sci-fi classic, but the sheer fact that it's entertaining at all makes “Battleship” more of a hit than a miss.
It borrows much too heavily from other films, especially "Transformers," and its first 20 minutes drag as it details the boneheaded antics of boy-man protagonist Alex Hooper (Taylor Kitsch of "Friday Night Lights") before he lands a gig in the Navy.
At times, this feels like a slightly milder version of Peter Berg's generally reviled Very Bad Things , a 1998 black comedy also about a Las Vegas bachelor party gone grotesquely awry.
This is the customary set up for a bachelor-party-gone-haywire comedy, in the style of Peter Berg’s equally-ludicrous Very Bad Things, followed by the flashback to two days ago.
The box office success of The Hangover puts into interesting context another movie about a bachelor party that goes wrong in Las Vegas.
But this is a comedy — or it’s meant to be — and as much as I would have loved for the sense of the sinister inherent in this concept to turn into something deeply, blackly funny (I’m thinking of Very Bad Things as a possible precedent for this, but The Hangover is never so audacious), Lucas and Moore and director Todd Phillips (School for Scoundrels, Starsky & Hutch) go for the easy, cheap laughs, things that will shock a juvenile mindset — a mother breastfeeding?
This is not a dopey/sweet Vegas comedy, like the bland What Happens in Vegas, or a nasty/nihilistic one, like the putrid Very Bad Things (both of which, now that I think about it, starred Cameron Diaz).
The remaining three men spend the next day and a half trying to piece together exactly what the hell happened during their long blackout, and this is where Jon Lucas and Scott Moore's beautifully constructed screenplay really shines; instead of a blow-by-blow orgy of decadence, a la Very Bad Things, it's laid out like a murder mystery.
Picked up by the Weinstein Company out of the SXSW Film Festival earlier this year, this intimately observed film combines elements of sports docs like Hoop Dreams with real-life plot lines that echo those of Friday Night Lights and The Blind Side.
Even though familiar themes abound, as depicted in melodramas like "Friday Night Lights" or The Blind Side, Undefeated is still inspiring and very emotional.
Daniel Lindsay and T. J. Martin's extraordinary documentary Undefeated follows them through what looks like a championship season, resulting in something akin to a non-fiction Friday Night Lights--both in terms of subject matter and emotional weight.
Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s Oscar winning documentary Undefeated is one of the best I’ve seen in some time, and as far as American Football flicks go, it’s the closest to touching the greatness of H.G. Bissinger’s tome Friday Night Lights and Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side .
The “Friday Night Lights” motto wonderfully, movingly comes to life in the Oscar-winning story of Coach Bill Courtney and Manassas High School, an underfunded Memphis school whose football program lost its luster as the town lost jobs following the closing of a Firestone plant.
This is well-traveled ground, after all, with a steady stream of narrative variations, from Remember the Titans and We Are Marshall to Friday Night Lights and The Blind Side.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Lone Survivor (2013), Friday Night Lights (2004)
Visuals Characters
A barrage of in-your-face machismo with a stylized, chaotic visual style that owes equal debt to "The Blair Witch Project" and the D-Day landing in "Saving Private Ryan," it leaves you feeling pummeled like a sacked quarterback.
It's what the Omaha Beach sequence in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan is to Oliver Stone's Platoon: an evolution by way of devolution that erases the veneer, such as there is, prettifying violent confrontation, becoming in the process the unadorned engine to which Stone's ultimately featherweight Any Given Sunday aspired.
It’s important to separate the men described in his book from their depiction in movies like Lone Survivor, which is crudely written, rife with clichés, and leaves out anything that would transform a piece of propaganda into a work of art akin to Samuel Fuller’s The Steel Helmet, Brian DePalma’s Casualties of War, or Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.
The first act is less successful; it appears the film’s primary inspiration, in both the battle and off-battle parts, is “Saving Private Ryan.”
“I am the reaper,” whispers Foster’s stoic marksman, as if aiming to unseat Barry Pepper’s character in Saving Private Ryan for the title of Coolest Sniper.
Writer-director Peter Berg’s battle-heated “Lone Survivor” follows the searing D-Day beach landings of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” the edge-of-destruction bomb-defusing in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker” and intense dramatization of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in “Zero Dark Thirty,” another war film directed by Bigelow.
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)
Directed by Michael Bay
influenced by Lone Survivor (2013), The Kingdom (2007)
Themes
It is neither as grossly gratuitous as Peter Berg's "Lone Survivor" nor as gripping as Ridley Scott's "Black Hawk Down."
Most of all, it’s a tribute to the brave U.S. fighters who kept a horrific situation from turning much worse, and it’s on that support-our-troops score — which propelled “American Sniper” and “Lone Survivor” to surprise-hit status — that this Paramount release will have its best shot at connecting with war-weary domestic audiences beyond Bay’s fan base.
And while it’s not on par with either of those movies, it is more thought-provoking than the straight-up chest-pounding of “Lone Survivor,” the Taliban-hunting Peter Berg film from 2013.
This is the kind of war film that will be a hard to shake off because it's so intense much like The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, Lone Survivor and Black Hawk Down.
Hoping to capitalize on the box-office bonanza of two previous rah-rah military movies that opened wide in January — Lone Survivor and American Sniper — Bay keeps blowing shit up for a punishing two hours and 24 minutes.
He then wanted to direct Lone Survivor, but Peter Berg snatched it out from under him.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Directed by William Wyler
influenced Battleship (2012)
Characters
He also sets a tempo markedly slower than Michael Bay's, suggesting an affinity with more old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment (the first half hour even references The Best Years of Our Lives and Jerry Lewis's The Bellboy).
I was even able to maintain my composure, just barely, when the double-amputee ex-Army hero played by Iraq vet Gregory D. Gadson —shades of Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives—got his wish to play soldier again.
Meanwhile, we get scenes of the girlfriend, a scientist (Hamish Linklater), and a wounded army vet with prosthetic legs (Gregory D. Gadson, who, in a tip of the hat to “The Best Years of Our Lives,” is the real thing), trying to sabotage the aliens’ communications.
A few scenes, a few sentiments and the tone seem inspired by the John Wayne flag-waver “The Green Berets,” an another war film about another battle in another war (Vietnam), but also one where victory is spun out of something that looked nothing like victory at the time.
The troubling thing about criticism like this is not the identification of films that actually do glorify what they represent (e.g., The Green Berets ), but that it misidentifies those that don't ( Lone Survivor ).
The Way Back (2020)
Directed by Gavin O'Connor
influenced by Friday Night Lights (2004)
Visuals Themes
He's ably aided by the gritty cinematography of Eduard Grau (Boy Erased), brisk editing of David Rosenbloom (Friday Night Lights), and moody score by Rob Simonsen (Foxcatcher).
Even the shaky-cam, natural-lighting shooting style — which gives the games a lived-in, organic feel — is straight out of Friday Night Lights .
Like all the best sports movies—from Friday Night Lights to Hoosiers to Field of Dreams—this one has more on its mind than the game clock and the scoreboard.
The Way Back borrows conventions from such jock uplift films as Remember the Titans and Friday Night Lights but violates inspirational movie principles.
In hindsight, Berg has always had an interest in showcasing memorable fight sequences, going all the way back to 2003’s The Rundown , which cited the iconic alleyway brawl from John Carpenter’s They Live as an inspiration.
Though there’s some effort to move beyond the Saved by the Bell approach of the original show and pump in a grittier teen vibe (think Riverdale, or a sillier Friday Night Lights), this is still a movie that opens on a scene set in the Cretaceous period, where a nude and blue-skinned alien called Zordon (Bryan Cranston) summons a meteor to strike the earth to wipe out his nemesis Rita Repulsa (Elizabeth Banks).
The new film does have an intermittent “Friday Night Lights” vibe and a campfire scene of Power Rangers baring their souls to one another.
Even with such campy morsels to play with, the vibe director Dean Israelite seems to be going for is "Friday Night Lights" meets "Fantastic Four," which actually isn't totally awful at the beginning as we meet the five high school students destined to wield their newly found superpowers to save the world.
Pearl Harbor (2001)
Directed by Michael Bay
influenced Battleship (2012), Patriots Day (2016), Lone Survivor (2013)
Plot Themes
Battleship makes you reconsider every mean thing you ever said about Michael Bay: Compared to this, even Pearl Harbor starts looking good.
For director Peter Berg, whose Hollywood action resume leads with “Hancock” but pales in comparison to Michael Bay’s “Transformers,” “Pearl Harbor,” “Armageddon” and “Bad Boys,” “Battleship” proves that Berg is a worthy adversary as a blockbuster action director.
Hell, so long as I'm comparing this to similar movies, I'll also say that it's a hell of a lot better than 2001's Pearl Harbor, which also featured the Navy and took place around Hawaii.
We get a Transformers takedown of Hong Kong - complete with collapsing Dark of the Moon style skyscraper - as well as callbacks to one of Bay’s worst, Pearl Harbor.
It's pretty much a mash-up of his Transformers and Pearl Harbor in a film that pits seafaring alien forces against the US Navy.
It is the simple yet vivid characterizations that distinguish Berg’s storytelling from Michael Bay’s fanboy fantasy history in Pearl Harbor (2001) and from the seditious nihilism in Day Night Day Night, Julia Loktev’s 2006 suicide-bomber indie movie.
Coach Carter (2005)
Directed by Thomas Carter
influenced by Friday Night Lights (2004)
Themes Visuals Plot
Based on a real life coach, also named Ken Carter (who's been hitting talk shows with Jackson to promote the film), Carter takes an approach that's part Lean on Me meets Hoosiers, part Stand and Deliver meets Friday Night Lights, and okay, maybe a little White Shadow, too.
"Coach Carter," like "Friday Night Lights," goes beyond the standard sports movie playbook to examine the consequences of short-sightedness and the perils of pinning all your hopes on one uncertain dream.
The hoops scenes, filmed in the hyperkinetic, handheld style of "Friday Night Lights," take us inside the action on the court.
See, this is kinda the anti Friday Night Lights , which glorified the idea that high…
The "real life" underdog story has recently run through ice hockey (Miracle) and football (Friday Night Lights).
You've seen all this before, and not just in Miracle and Friday Night Lights.
The film this most reminds me of goes back to the 1980 “The Final Countdown” starring Kirk Douglas, a sci-fi’er in which a modern aircraft carrier gets mysteriously transported back to December 1941 in the hours leading up to the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
Hemsworth's Marine leads a resistance force that includes (of course) the town's star high school quarterback (the Disney Channel's Josh Peck), a girl who has the hots for Jed (Adrianne Palicki of "Friday Night Lights"), a geek (Josh Hutcherson of "The Hunger Games"), the head cheerleader (Isabel Lucas) and the mayor's son (that would be Connor Cruise, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's kid), who is appalled to find his father cooperating with the invaders.
The best segments of the film occur early, as the setting is established with a dose of Friday Night Lights normalcy followed by an invasion that recalls Independence Day .
Adrianne Palicki (“Friday Night Lights”) has the Grey part, Josh Hutcherson (“The Hunger Games”) the C. Thomas Howell role; in the Sheen role, Josh Peck (“The Wackness”) is Jed’s rebellious kid brother Matt, while blond Aussie Isabel Lucas has the Thompson role of cheerleader Erica.
Since her outstanding work on TV's "Friday Night Lights," Adrianne Palicki (2010's " Legion ") has been someone to watch out for, and she makes Toni a strong, likable, captivating heroine.
It’s Friday Night Lights territory, but without good writing or acting.
John Carter himself, played with rugged, independent quiet by "Friday Night Lights" star Taylor Kitsch, seems akin to Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name.
The film features a good cast, starting with Taylor Kitsch -- so memorable as Tim Riggins in "Friday Night Lights" and seemingly on his way to a solid film career -- as Carter.
Taylor Kitsch, who didn't make much of an impression as Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, again tries to parlay his Friday Night Lights TV stardom into full-blown cinematic acceptance.
Friday Night Lights star Kitsch anchors it all as the eponymous soldier (grieving over the death of his wife) who goes native after he's teleported to Mars (Barsoom, to its residents) and falls for princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins).
Suffice it to say, we are on Mars with the titular John Carter (Friday Night Lights’ Kitsch), a former cavalry hero of the Confederacy who is spending his post-Civil War life searching for gold in the Arizona territories.
Rihanna playing Raikes and Jesse Plemons as Ordy feel like homage to Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein in Aliens (but of course, inferior).
We Were Soldiers, Hacksaw Ridge, Lone Survivor — their soldiers may be brave or weak, gung ho or skeptical, stoned or not, but they do their duty.
Screenwriters Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson come to the assignment having previously collaborated on two Mark Wahlberg movies, “The Fighter” and “Patriots Day,” although it’s another of Wahlberg’s true-story projects, the Afghanistan-set “Lone Survivor” (in which they had no part), that “The Outpost” most resembles.
Berg and Wahlberg themselves made a true-story Afghan War movie with 2013’s Lone Survivor, and while The Outpost is less bombastic, it’s also less distinctive.
The Outpost is a reasonably strong war film, probably the best feature film made to date about the war in Afghanistan (although, compared to Lone Survivor, 12 Strong, and War Machine, the competition isn’t exactly stiff.
The jingoistic kind are not only bad (Lone Survivor, American Sniper), they exacerbate the toxic notion of American exceptionalism.
…jingoist, nationalist Hollywood war films that depict Iraq as a third-world country and American veterans as heroes (like Act of Valor and Lone Survivor, which Mendoza worked on)…
…nor does it offer much in the way of the solemn patriotism of, say, Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor…
…(through his company, ‘War Office Productions’, Mendoza has also worked on Mark Wahlberg action films Mile 22 and Lone Survivor)…
Mendoza’s experience as a SEAL as well as military advisor for prior films such as Lone Survivor and Civil War goes a long way in terms of what you’re seeing onscreen.
Mendoza has had a successful career as a Military Advisor on films like Lone Survivor…
It’s completely borrowed from Back to the Future and Marty McFly not wanted to be called chicken.
(In the film's laziest set of jokes, Hancock is set off by the word "asshole," a gag last used to good effect in 1985's Back to the Future .)