Trailer Tracking, Super Bowl Edition: ‘John Carter,’ ‘The Avengers,’ ‘Battleship,’ ‘GI Joe 2: Retaliation’

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Movie: “Battleship”

Best Part of the Trailer: Isn’t it kind of cool that something this bat-**** crazy actually exists?

Worst Parts of the Trailer: The fact that the filmmakers seem intent on claiming that this is an original film and not just a Glee-style “mash-up” of previous terrible action movies; the idea that some studio actually bought the pitch “Gambit and Rihanna Save the World!”; That no one ever utters the phrase “J-7, mother-****er!”

OUR TAKE: WOW.

Just… wow. Where… wow… where to begin? I have a lot of respect for Peter Berg as a filmmaker, so there’s this tough little space, deep down inside of my brain, that is convinced that SOMEHOW “Battleship” will turn out to be the surprisingly fun sleeper hit of the summer. But that little nugget of defiance shrinks exponentially any time I actually see any footage from “Battleship”.

Honestly, what the hell was that? The “Battleship” Superbowl trailer is such a schizophrenic mess that it’s hard to not feel like you’re being Punk’d while watching it. What is this movie?? It opens with a scene of a circular robot wheel running amok on a freeway, which I’m pretty sure is just unused footage from “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (it doesn’t help that the trailer IMMEDIATELY declares to its audience that this film comes Hasbro, the company that also owns the “Transformers”). We then get Michael Bay-esque shots of projectiles slamming into a city, destroying it, as a voice-over (that I’m pretty sure was lifted directly from “Deep Impact”) tells us, “We’re looking at an extinction level event.” Then there are these mecha-suited aliens that are right out of “Halo” and a force-field dome situation that reeks of Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” and… sigh… how the HELL does this have ANYTHING to do with a peg-game about sinking battleships?!

They barely even feature the sea battle aspect of the film until the 0:40 second mark of the 1:00 trailer and then it’s just a big collage of explosions, more scenes of action taking place nowhere near the water, and people screaming “FIRE EVERYTHING!” It’s a big bloody mess.
And, again, man, Taylor Kitsch, I loved you in “Friday Night Lights” and I’m sorry about my “John Carter” gripes, but you don’t even have the brand awareness of a Shia LaBeouf. You are still an unproven commodity in the film world, so the idea that audiences should be thrilled that you’re the “inside man” who’s going to save humanity – with pop star Rihanna as your Doc Holliday – how are we not supposed to laugh at that? This whole film looks like someone took the contents of Michael Bay’s office and sent it over to the “Will It Blend” guys on YouTube. All that the trailers for “Battleship” have told us so far is that this is a film with no sense of identity. Wait, strike that, this is a film with FIFTEEN different senses of identity and none of them particularly play nicely with each other.

Maybe Peter Berg can pull it off. I’d LOVE to be wrong on this one. But, man, the trailers for “Battleship” just keep getting progressively funnier and funnier, and for all of the wrong reasons.

TRAILER OUTLOOK: AMAZING… until I realized that it wasn’t a “Funny or Die” parody. Then I got sad. VERY sad…