Battleship

Episode 241: Battleship (2012)

Theme: Board Game Month
Hosts: Oz & Curtis

This week, Oz and Curtis roll out the grid to kick off Board Game Month with the massive, multi-million-dollar 2012 box office anomaly, Battleship. It’s a film that asks the ultimate geopolitical question: What if a global naval training exercise in Hawaii accidentally triggered an interstellar red-light, green-light matchup against humanoid aliens in high-tech battle suits? Grab your chicken burritos, fire up the AC/DC, and prepare to deploy the decommissioned, World War II-era Missouri because it is time to Tokyo-drift a battleship.

The hosts break down:

• Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch): A standard underachieving rogue who goes from breaking into a mini-mart via the ceiling for a microwave burrito to becoming the tactical mastermind of the United States Navy.

• Stone Hopper (Alexander Skarsgård): The overachieving older brother who manages to look deep into his brother's eyes across nautical miles of ocean before meeting a very sudden, explosive end.

• The "Phantasm Balls": Indestructible alien saw-blades that tear up Hawaii's infrastructure, proving that the extraterrestrial weapons division clearly spent its budget in the right place.

• The Tsunami Grid: A genuinely clever tactical pivot where the remaining sailors use NOAA water-displacement buoys to recreate a literal, retro-style Battleship game board on their monitors.

• The Veteran Cavalry: A glorious and entirely practical solution to an alien forcefield that involves recruiting an entire deck of 80-year-old Navy veterans who are apparently just waiting in the wings to manual-load a 1,000-pound shell.

• The Bridge Crawl: A highly questionable bit of cinematic acrobatics where Alex and Nagata bear-crawl up an elevating, sinking Titanic-scale hull without any visible handles.

Final Verdict:

Oz — 15 MLB Milton Bradleys
Curtis — An F9 (You Sunk My Battleship!)