Battleship

Saw Battleship the movie on the bus en route to Baguio. Judging from the quality of the sound and the video, the DVD was obviously pirated (or bootleg DVD if you're a native English speaker). Anyway, the movie was interesting but though the writer/s tried to put emphasis on the story of the protagonist Alex Hopper played by Taylor Kirtsch, the movie was really about the retired battleship USS Missouri and some old retired US Navy personnel who went back to active service to man the old-vacuum tube-analog battleship in its campaign against the aliens. Of course, the movie was also about a group of stupid scientists who sent signals into an earthlike planet not thinking that there maybe some hostile lizard-like aliens with superior technology and superior insecurity living out there bent on mining gold and fighting cowboys and destroying the earth by  kidnapping Indians and cowgirls  and terraforming the planet by venting out farts.

The signals sent by the scientists were received by the aliens, but since they could not speak English nor did they know binary machine language, they thought they were being threatened by cowboys. They sent ships to recon the planet. The aliens had superior technology and what was worse was that they were also hostile. So, the aliens attacked and tried to destroy humanity but one old vacuum tube-analog ship manned by retired Korean War veterans, some cowboys and a few Japanese, the USS Missouri, was able to destroy the alien mothership using its big guns. Incidentally there's some sort of historical play in the movie like including Japanese characters among the crew of the ship. The Missouri was the ship were the Japanese signed their surrender to the US.

Anyway, the movie was entertaining enough. The special effects, even through the bootleg disc, was good. Well, about the sound, I could barely hear the movie...What the? Why am I talking a bootleg DVD? Not fair...this is illegal!

Missouri was ordered in 1940 and commissioned in June 1944. In the Pacific Theater of World War II she fought in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and shelled the Japanese home islands, and she fought in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. She was decommissioned in 1955 into the United States Navy reserve fleets (the "Mothball Fleet"), but reactivated and modernized in 1984 as part of the 600-ship Navy plan, and provided fire support during Operation Desert Storm in January/February 1991. (Wikipedia)

The movie had a touch of Japanese something in it. I didn't know if it's only me but the movie was reminiscent of the seminal  old Japanese anime called "Space Battleship Yamato" or its English version "Starblazers."

Yamato, lead ship of a class of two 65,000-ton (over 72,800-tons at full load) battleships, was built at Kure, Japan. She and her sister, Musashi were by far the largest battleships ever built, even exceeding in size and gun caliber (though not in weight of broadside) the U.S. Navy's abortive Montana class. Their nine 460mm (18.1-inch) main battery guns, which fired 1460kg (3200 pound) armor piercing shells, were the largest battleship guns ever to go to sea, and the two ships' scale of armor protection was also unsurpassed.

Anyway, just thought about Yamato when I saw USS Missouri fighting it out with an alien ship. Anyway, Harrison Ford's and David Craig did a very gooey job in the movie. Why did Liam Neeson agreed to play a cowboy in the first place? He's better off playing an admiral or something....