Is Battleship really an anti-war movie in disguise?
At first glance, Battleship appears to be a fairly run-of-the-mill action blockbuster where plucky humans defeat scary aliens using cunning and cleverness rather than overwhelming force. The audience is led to believe that the aliens are threatening and hostile.
However, there's a decent amount of evidence that the story as told from the hero's point of view is not the whole story:
- The film goes out of its way to show the aliens as non-hostile from the start. They only attack military targets, either when provoked or when it's necessary to further their objective.
- The camera is very quick to cut away when it appears that a defenceless target is being attacked, meaning the audience never gets to see what happened.
- Every violent act committed by the aliens is in response to aggression from the humans. (In response to a comment, I'll concede that firing into traffic at Pearl Harbor is a hostile act. However, by the time this happens, the humans have already escalated hostilities, so it's not like it was completely unprovoked).
- The protagonist constantly makes mistakes and escalates hostilities at every opportunity. He actually botches the entire first contact mission, starts a war, gets huge numbers of innocent people killed, and also kills all of the aliens. At the end he is lauded as a hero despite all this. (Not to mention that the aliens were invited to Earth in the first place).
- Every time we see an alien's face, the alien is looking scared, panicked or threatened. This includes shots of the aliens on land and in their ships.
- The aliens have multiple opportunities to kill the protagonist (and many others) and spare their life every time.
In short: peaceful aliens come to Earth after receiving a signal from humanity. Their communications ship hits something in orbit and crash lands. They attempt to use a communications satellite to phone home, but are assaulted from all sides by the hostile natives.
The subtext here is so blatant that it can't possibly be unintentional. However, I can find no reference to this anywhere (presumably because the movie was panned by critics so no-one took it seriously).
I guess I have a few questions with this in mind:
- The central assumption is that the aliens are trying to access the communications satellite to summon reinforcements for a hostile invasion. Is this ever explicitly stated in the film? Or is it simply an assumption made by an unreliable character?
- Is this reading of the text supported by the text itself, or have I missed something important?
- Has anyone involved in the making of the film ever alluded to this potential subtext?
Best Answer
I couldn't disagree more with your assumptions. One point you have absolutely wrong is the assertion "every violent act committed by the aliens is in response to aggression from the humans". I would like to point at least one scene which would depose this position. When the main "ship" (whatever it was) shoots to two balls into Pearl Harbor, it is to do two things:
- Take out any and all military resistance
- Shut down the infrastructure
This is complete aggression. I see no way around it.
I believe what is happening is this: the invaders do not see anything "we" have (or can do) as anything which can oppose them, so as long as we don't get in their way, they couldn't care less. They are there to complete their mission. It's not that they are non-hostile (I mean, what do you call taking over a planet if not hostile? They didn't try to communicate with us before hand), it's that don't believe we have anything which can touch them. Not much us puny humans can do to stop them, so they just don't care. The aliens couldn't care less about 1st contact. They are looking for conquest.
It is an interesting theory, I just think it's off-base is all. Again, JMHO, but I guess that's what the call for analysis is all about, right?
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What was the point of Battleship movie?
A fleet of ships is forced to do battle with an armada of unknown origins in order to discover and thwart their destructive goals. An international fleet of naval warships encounters an alien armada while on a Naval war games exercise and faces the biggest threat mankind has ever faced.Is the Battleship movie real?
It's a blockbuster in the Simpson/Bruckheimer tradition. In addition to casting actual wounded veteran Greg Gadson as one of its heroes, the movie features vets who fought on a real battleship \u2014 the USS Missouri, also in the film \u2014 during World War II.Why was Battleship flopped?
It couldn't attract younger audiences The demo breakdown reveals Universal's fatal marketing mistake. Even though Battleship is family- and kid-friendly, the studio's promotion didn't target families as Hasbro's "sister film franchise" Transformers did so successfully.Is Battleship worth watching?
The dialog isn't Oscar-worthy, but is sometimes quite witty. In the end, Battleship is a prototypical summer actioner. It's nowhere nearly as good as The Avengers, but as a very different type of film is still worth seeing if big-budget mayhem is your thing.Navy Admiral Rates 8 Navy Warship Battles In Movies | How Real Is It?
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Answer 2
Yes I agree. The hint if given right near the start of the film, when the wreckage of the alien ship (which has accidentally clipped an earthling satellite and been trashed as a result) falls onto Hong Kong, narrowly missing a large statue of the Buddha, which by its own peaceful nature goes unharmed. If mankind had received the aliens in the same peaceful spirit in which they came, there would have been no conflict at all.
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