Battleship
Director Peter Berg
Starring Taylor Kitsch,  Alexander Skarsgård, Brooklyn Decker & Liam Neeson
Rated M
Score 4/6

American Warships
Director Thunder Levin
Stars Mario Van Peebles, Carl Weathers & Johanna Watts
Rated TV-14
Score 1/6




I wish I could say that there was a rational train of thought behind the decision of watching Battleship followed, by American Warships. Really, I do. I only found out that I posted my original review for Battleship 10 year ago as I started to write this. So, I’ll pretend that I had this little nugget of information before I started rewatching Battleship. At the time I thought that the link the filmmakers had for Battleship between the movie and the game was tenuious at best. For American Warships that link was practically nonexistant.
Battleship is about A fleet of ships is forced to do battle with an armada of unknown origins in order to discover and thwart their destructive goals. While American Warships (which was originally known as American Battleships but was forced to change due to a copyright lawsuit by Hasbro) is about the USS Iowa on its final voyage before being decommissioned and turning into a floating museum. When USS Enterprise is attacked and destroyed by a mysterious force, World War III looms. The captain of Iowa chases an invisible ship, which they discover to be an alien force waging war on Earth.
When I originally reviewed Battleship I didn’t like it, but I didn’t hate it either. I thought it was below average. It still is a questionable movie and can certainly be classified as an ad for the Navy and as a HFY or a FYH movie.  Ten years later my opinion of Battleship has softened a little bit mainly because I am found of the use of the song Thunderstruck by ACDC in the ‘I need to borrow your boat’ scene, a highpoint of the movie’s soundtrack when compared to Warships.
American Warships certainly continues the ‘I hate their movies yet respect them for not loosing money’ relationship that I have with The Asylum, there are also a couple of moments in Warships that if you try too hard to make the plot seem logical you might end up with a headache. In the past with some of the other movies I have reviewed released by The Asylum, I have felt that the movie has somehow insulted me personally. That is not the case here, though Warships certainly makes Battleship look better in comparison given that important plot points happened off screen and the effects used throughout the film have the distinct aura of ‘you get what you paid far’ that I readily associate with a movie from The Asylum, the best example of this was the effects used for the cloaking technology for the alien ships. The aliens in Warships are possibly some of the more ridiculous looking aliens that I have seen in a long time, the melting effect used for the aliens certainly was hilarious.
Over the past few years I have found that there has been more then a few ‘popcorn’ movies where the whole concept of the hero’s journey and getting the audience to emotionally invest themselves in the hero almost seemed taboo. So, it was great to see that from Taylor Kitsch’s performance and there where a couple of fun moments between ‘Weps’ and ‘Ordy’ portrayed by Rihanna and Jesse Plemons. There is part of me that hopes that somewhere out there, there is a Looney Tunes themed alternative take to Rihanna’s ‘Mahalo, motherf…’ line. With American Warships I really wasn’t that familiar with the majority of the cast and I was a little surprised to see Mario Van Peebles pop in this one as it has been more then a few years since I last saw him in a movie (I might have to watch and review a better movie of his). Warships is a movie that I don’t want to watch again any time soon, but I loved Carl Weathers’ onscreen presence.