10 Movies That Aren’t As Bad As Everyone Says

2. Battleship

Battleship looked like a cynical Transformers clone. And on a conceptual level it was. Based off another Hasbro property, this time a board game where the story development began and ended with what colour peg you use, Battleship reimagined itself as an alien invasion action story with robots with lots of moving parts wreaking havoc. That's what the trailers showed and that's what everyone went into the movie expecting to see, leading to everyone dismissing it as a cash-in without attempting any real form of analysis.

Which is a shame, because where Transformers is an assault on the senses with delusions it's something worthy, Battleship at the very least knew how dumb it was; unlike Michael Bay, director Peter Berg tried to have fun with the concept of militaristic fetishism.

The film doesn't fully commit to its schlockiness in the same way Hercules does, but the effort's clearly there. The climax of the film sees a group of naval vets take control of the USS Missouri to take on the aliens and it treats that as ridiculously as it should, willingly slipping into self parody as the cheesy quips come out.

Battleship is not a good film and this entry is certainly not intended to be any form of endorsement. It is, however, an attempt to treat the sub-genre of toy properties with the lack of reverence it deserves.