Battleship marketed itself as Transformers-on-sea, trying to entice the same audience of Michael Bays money raking franchise, but ended up just looking like a rip-off. This was commercial suicide; fans of Transformers boycotted it for copying their favourite series and those who hated the series wouldn't be seen dead watching it, immediately thinking it would be as bad as what had come before. Surprisingly, Battleship wasn't as offensive as the robots in disguise, rather just an overlong, boring film that took an hour to get anywhere. But, following a groaningly awful attempt to work the board game mechanics into the film, the film suddenly realises its heavy handedness and begins to mock itself. In a last ditch effort to stop the motiveless aliens, the generic hero enlists a gang of octogenarian veterans to commandeer the now-museum USS Missouri. After two hours of fetishistic gun battles, this sequence comes as brilliant pallet cleanser, with the old men straight facedly taking on (and obviously defeating) the alien threat. This sequence is the case of a film having taken itself so seriously that the only way to continue is to start ripping on itself; in this case it is quite obviously intentional humour. Sadly, it appeared that this was lost of the majority of the film going public who, at least in my showing and in various reviews, seemed to think the sequence was meant to be a serious, patriotic stirring scene.