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Fast & Furious 6 review

Hands down one of the silliest movies I’ve seen in a while.
And Battleship is one of my favourite movies.
Fast & Furious 6 was very silly, so much so it pushed suspension of disbelief to breaking point and beyond.

The thing about Battleship is that it knows it’s a silly movie, it’s a movie based on a board game.
It’s got aliens in it, there’s ships, most of them aren’t battleships (spoiler; there’s only one ‘battleship’ in the movie Battleship), the rest of the ships in Battleship are destroyers or other sorts of vessels.
Actually all this information is given in quite a simple way with a bit of footage and a short bit of dialogue so you understand the difference between a destroyer and a battleship. It doesn’t however impart the difference between a boat and a ship. But generally you can put a boat on a ship but you can’t put a ship on a boat.

Returning to the topic for a moment....
I watched this on blu-ray, and used the fast forward button more than a few times, it was the only way to get through this movie, (even my favourite movie Battleship I usually skip through the soccer scene at the start).

Fast & Furious 6 carries so much baggage from the previous films that its title/opening credits sequence serves as a “Previously on” for the movie.
Small mercies at least it wasn’t a character having a flashback sequence of all the salient events of the previous movies, that would have been worse, even more so if it included a voice over.

Fast & Furious 6 takes itself too seriously and it’s a film that shouldn’t be serious it should be a movie that knows it’s a bit silly, or at least know that what they’re up to is at least a bit silly. Aside from one mention of ‘James Bond shit’ there’s no acknowledgement that the events within the movie are practically impossible and outside the bounds of ‘normal’.

The setting for most of Fast & Furious 6 was London.
Maybe they were running out of interesting locations to shoot. My first thought was that there was some sort of money deal that meant they could shoot there. But skipping through the Wikipedia article for Fast & Furious 6 there doesn’t seem to be the word “concession” used anywhere in the article. “Tax” is used once in relation to them shooting in the Canary Islands who gave a tax rebate of 38%.

The early ‘Fast and Furious’ movies were a fun mix of fast cars, soundtrack and vaguely good looking people doing stuff in a vaguely real way. This movie just smashes a lot of the suspension of disbelief out of the way. It’s definitely not helped by the way it treats physics. Optimistically I would say that physics are treated in a cartoon fashion. But it’s the way they play it so very straight whenever they ignore the laws of physics. There are jumps and catches mid air and then when they land it’s against a car’s windscreen or something.
I probably would have had less problem with it if they had some of the characters, after having done this do the movie-style thing of coughing up or spitting out some blood. Giving you some vague indication that they were hurt rather than just shrugging.

With Fast & Furious 6 I just couldn’t help while watching the scenes in London, just thinking, that The Italian Job, the original 1969 one not the really quite awful other film from 2003 also of the same name, that was the best car heist film. It’s got everything in it, some great quotable dialogue, some great uses of cars. Iconic cars at that; Minis.

Also, I never really noticed how god-y Fast and Furious 6 is. Maybe I never really noticed it in the previous films, but there’s a fair amount of god-related stuff in the films which could have been avoided, so it was obviously a deliberate choice to have them in there.

Finally. I didn’t like any of the characters in this film.
Some like Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) playing Hobbs I couldn’t work out why he was in the movie. I seem to recall he was in the last one. Johnson is cartoon like in his presence on screen, and that’a against Vin Diesel who is also almost cartoon like. Both are buffed up, except Johnson is too much, just him being in a scene throws out any believability.

Going back to Battleship, with its silliness, basic plot and lots of explosions and big soundtrack with AC/DC on it, it makes you understand and like the characters very quickly.
It’s quite economical with how it establishes everything (even if there’s a soccer match at the start which wastes about 10 minutes of the movie). Most of the characters in Battleship are likeable, there’s moderately interesting and you kinda care about them.
I didn’t really care about any of the characters in this movie, the biggest emotive response I had to the characters was fining them irritating.

Double finally, as all movies seem to have a post-credits sequence then I’ll write a final paragraph after ‘finally’. Things that make little sense; Paul Walker’s character flying back from London to the US to be locked jail up to find out information that could probably have come to the characters with some hand waving and tech-related sort of scenes in London. Location choices; RAF Bentwaters standing in for NATO base in Lusitania, Spain. I recognised this one because it’s been used on Top Gear. It’s also only shown on an overcast day and at night. If it weren’t for the onscreen graphics you wouldn’t know where it was (ok, fine there was dialogue indicating that the characters were going to Spain). That overcast day could and should have been either re-shot on a sunnier day or had the sky repainted to make it look sunnier. There’s enough movie short hand that exist that says Spain = sunny. Not overcast. Even in a moody military scene involving NATO Spain it should have been sunny, otherwise it could have been anywhere.

Favourite movie of 2012 - Battleship

Battleship is flawed, relatively flawed, but still a great movie.

It’s a great action movie with a great huge scoop of science fiction, and it’s fairly shamelessly  just that.

That’s what makes it great and a re-watchable movie.

There is not a lot of drama or anything other than action in this movie, there’s a little bit of humour here and there.

It should be noted that this movie includes in its credits “Based on the Hasbro board game Battleship”.
If you go into this movie knowing this and expecting not too much from the movie it’s actually really enjoyable.

It looks amazing, on Blu-ray especially it looks wonderful, the colours are rich and intense, the setting of Hawaii and the sea around it make for some really intense visuals.
Inside the ships everything is still intense, yet muted.

Sound wise this is a great film to watch in a surround sound setup, it gives all 5 speakers a good work out and the sub-woofer also is given a good rumble throughout the action sequences.
But even with a set of stereo speakers, or even just a pair of headphones it’s full of intense sound that really helps to make this movie great.

But it’s not just action and explosions, there’s some good tactical scenes of naval warfare knowledge at work. It is quite fortunate that the aliens are not a “shoot first ask questions later” sort of species but follow a fairly easy to understand war laws or something that means you basically have to be aggressive towards them before they attack you.

Which means for a action science fiction film the civilian deaths in this movie are actually quite low. The only people who I think would die is a result of aliens taking out infrastructure.

Characters wise they’re all good though there’s no real character development outside of the first 20 minutes or so.

On that 20 minutes, it basically sets up Taylor Kitsch as one of the main characters Alex Hopper as a risk taker and youthful, they make sure he’s seen almost naked and shirtless within the first 10 minutes. His brother is Stone Hopper played by Alexander Skarsgård which is an interesting choice. Skarsgård is perhaps best known for playing Eric Northman in True Blood, or if you’re only into war-based drama then he played Brad Colbert in the excellent Generation Kill.
Within that 20 minutes is a soccer game, which seems present to bulk out the film and to cement the character of Alex Hopper as someone who despite joining the Navy is still a risk taker and hot head.
The other interesting casting choice of note is Rihanna, she plays Cora Raikes, whose name I didn’t really notice in the film, so that info comes from Wikipedia. She’s a Gunner's Mate Second Class (GM2), crew mate and a weapons specialist. Battleship appears to be her only acting role so far. I found her pretty convincing her character gets to shoot at aliens, get beaten up by aliens and fire weapons on Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer and also on an actual battleship, an Iowa-class battleship.

Yes, on that, only one genuine battleship appears in the film, though this is explained quickly and briefly at the start as to why the navy doesn’t have battleships much anymore.

Now, back to the flaws. It is those that make the movie, once you can acknowledge these flaws and move on or fast forward through them it becomes a great movie. Perfect movies are fairly hard to find, but it’s the imperfections that make you truly enjoy a movie because you know there’s some parts that aren’t any good that are a bit ropey. But you’ll still sit down and watch it because the rest is great and those ropey parts aren’t really that bad in perspective.