Death by Rihanna
by ALEX CARNEVALE
Battleship
dir. Peter Berg
131 minutes
To comprehend all of Rihanna's dialogue in Peter Berg's Battleship is like sorting through the tendrils of 8th century Chinese poetry — so much is said in so little. After spending the first hour of the film uttering such bon mots as "Come on" or "Yes sir," she really opens up when she, along with the otherwise all-male crew of the John Paul Jones, witnesses the unmasking of the first alien species in recorded history. She opens her mouth as if to sigh, and then utters the prophetic words: "My dad said they'd come. He said, we ain't alone."
Out of sheer boredom Peter Berg turns Battleship into a Levi-Straussian jumble of signs and signifiers. It's sort of what watching Mozart try to play Kelly Clarkson's "Mr. Know It All" on a harmonica would be like. Shortly after the arrival of an alien race sophisticated enough to reach Earth from another galaxy, Rihanna enters into a serious physical confrontation with the organism. Screenings of Battleship in specific metro areas will feature the accompanying Greimas semiotic square explaining the event:
Watching Rihanna take a bloody lip from a disrespectful alien-machine amalgam and trying to enjoy it is very difficult, perhaps on the level of trying to the explain the work of Levi-Strauss at West Point. It is doubly disturbing that the alien lets her go with only that much violence, as if it was meant to stand in for something more. To address the issue of domestic abuse and minority empowerment in a film adapted from a board game stands as one of the definitive artistic achievements of this decade, if not of all time.
Battleship begins when the ne'er-do-well younger brother of a Navy captain named Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) is immersed in a series of monumental fuckups, all bearing a loose but explicit relation to the catastrophic results of American military might over the past decades. First he falls over himself trying to steal a chicken burrito to impress an ungainly blonde woman (Brooklyn Decker); this tragically ends when he is tasered in a moment akin to the savage losses of the Iran-Contra debacle. Appropriately the first ship he serves on is named the Ronald Reagan.
it was down to Taylor Kitsch and Donald Signifier for the role
In the very next scene Alex Hopper launches a climactic penalty kick over the head of a triumphant Japanese goalkeeper who strangely speaks perfect English (the ethnic confusion is merely an allegory for American racism, of course). And so on. Even the name of the actor portraying the film's protagonist is a grotesque joke on the military industrial complex.
Alex Hopper and Brooklyn Decker fall in love despite his mistakes, and he plans to marry her once he receives the permission of her father, Admiral Dickson Shane (Liam Neeson). The casting of Liam Neeson implies so much in Battleship. Something has been Taken, other questions are Unknown, and the approximate state of U.S. military power is in all likelihood Obi Wan Kenobi. "You've got skills," Neeson tells Hopper, "but I have never seen a man waste them like you."
Admiral Shane, you're wanted at the wet bar
He is not the only one disappointed by the exertion of careless American military might. Alex Hopper's brother (Alexander Skarsgård) is routinely upset by the way that his little brother's machinations reflect on his career. "Who do I call to teach you humility?" Eric Northman screams at Hopper, and the camera sails 450 feet in the air in a meaningful nod to the fact that powerful Hollywood executives refused to cast Alexander Skarsgård as Thor. This grave mistake is compounded by the fact that Skarsgård dies about a half hour into the movie in a symbolic nod to Steven Seagal's death in Executive Decision, which would be an ideal subtitle for the Battleship sequel. With all this symbolic nodding it's a wonder Berg didn't accidentally snap his neck.
plane of praxis
The aliens' plan is to drop a bubble shield around the island of Hawai'i, where they can use a powerful satellite uplink to relay a message to their homeworld that Earth is ripe for conquest. Their timing could not be worse, as the Navy is currently performing a series of fully armed wargames with multiple battleships in the region. The aliens themselves resemble humans with long blonde goatees that make them look like Kid Rock and eyelids that blink horizontally.
With biped movement and a similar skeletal structure, the aliens are undoubtedly derived from human stock. Possibly they are human visitors from the future, in which case talk of "an extinction-level event" would be completely impossible. Presumably the aliens originate from an ocean planet, because they seem rather awkward moving around on land, equipped as they are in massive metal suits, and all their spacecrafts are designed to be operated in a large body of water. Maybe they just wanted to drop in for a swim. Since none of this is ever outright stated, the subtlety is shocking in a film with a budget this large.
authentic learning
In the end Alex Hopper earns a silver star and the commendation of an entire nation, even though the idea that ends up saving the planet is entirely the work of a Japanese commander. Berg's point is that the sheer amount of money we spend on armament and war is only remotely justifiable if we are suddenly invaded by aliens who would never even know of our existence if we had not specifically requested they come and attempt to conquer us. If you're travelling among the stars, please, never say where you're from.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about the life of Victoria Woodhull. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.
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