Battleship : A Better Than Expected Fare

"From the makers of Transformers" and the first assumption I had was this is gonna be another run of the mill mindless action flick from the stables of Michael Bay. I was so sure of this fact that I didnt even bother to confirm it. On a saturday evening when I had nothing better to do after a energy sapping Corp Fin exam , couple of friends wanted to catch this movie , so I tagged along at the last moment and was mildly surprised with this movie, thinking that Michael Bay has improved from his last flick (the utterly mindless Transformers 2 & 3) until the moment the end credits start rolling , which gave away the director as some Peter Berg (Hancock), and I signed a big sense of relief.... 

Coming to the movie the plot was pretty decent with a group of alien ships(humanoid  race apparently) raiding the earth which looked like a invasion plan. But just 5 ships to conquer the entire earth, which were not bigger than any of the navy ships of the earthlings, and you know there is a serious plot hole (atleast they should have been the size of those in Independence Day , which set the benchmark for alien invasion movies ). A multinational group of navy ships is sent to intercept and explore it.  Anyway the aliens create a sort of force field around them so that none of the navy ships can enter it other than 3 navy destroyers which get trapped inside. So starts the cat and mouse game between the navy ships and the alien ships, a perfect adaptation of the actual grid based "Battleship" game, and I loved the way they adapted it.  At one instance they actually are looking at a grid based display and calling the shots trying to intercept the alien ships. 

Another honorable mention is the soundtrack which was bombastic in the real sense bringing the full experience of watching this movie in the cinema. Special effects were also very good, with a lot of explosions, destruction, blazing canon's, sea battles keeping the action buffs rooted to their seats. But again when you have a WW-II era battleship thrown into the sea battle (which supposedly was not even started for the past 10 years) and you get distracted a bit with the plotholes in the script. I was like "WTH????" when the actual operators of the decommissioned WW-II era warship (the oldies of course) appear from nowhere to crew the ship !!!!! Even then the final climax was fitting and satisfying. Rihanna in her first apperance as an actor is a bit irritating sometimes. An awesome actor like Liam Neeson is completely wasted. Dont know what the heck was he doing in this movie. Brooklyn Decker (apparently she is a SI model :) ) plays the female lead and is an absolute eye-candy. Oh ya.. the lead actor Taylor Kitsch is OK. 

 A decent action movie with a few story line, few comic scenes thrown here and there. But what impressed the most was navy maneuvers they have adapted in this movie. Apparently this movie is released here in India almost a month before US for reasons unknown. Anyway a rating of 3.5/5 even after overlooking some major plot holes.