At least when 1996's Independence Day came out, it took a time-worn premise of alien invasion and melded it with the theatrics of Star Wars and patriotism of Top Gun. Like the Indiana Jones films, it took the premises of other genres and created its own take on it, effectively inventing a new kind of summer action film (that has been copied many times since).
Battleshit (no, that's not a typo) is filmmaking at its most utter laziest. Studios have long been guilty of harvesting known properties that they either own previously or license from. It's that 'safe bet' that they can pitch to their corporate overloads, since we haven't been in the days of filmmaker owned studios since the early 1980. But at least The Avengers is based on stories that have characters. There is a history there that is being translated through actors and live action. Hell, I will even go slightly out on the limb and defend the craptastic Transformers movies, taken from cartoon toy commercials in the 1980s, as at LEAST deriving from characters with names. Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, etc. The shiny objects have a voice and a history.
But Battleshit? I mean, where do I begin? Let's just state the hilarious obvious: it's a board game with pegs and plastic ships. There are no characters, there are no stories. They just looked at the toys lying around their office or their licensed partner's offices and said, "What's plastic grid with round red and white dots on it? Screw it. Let's make a movie about that. Here's $150 million." Was this whole project a dare by some drunk execs out on the town seeing who would actually greenlight a movie out of the dumbest premise?
Regardless, it's a tentpole for a studio, and it's laughable. And sad and pathetic. Worse, there are likely good scripts out there sitting in dustbins. Films that would have had a shot at consideration 15 years ago, hell maybe 10 years ago even, but will never be made now. All that development and production money going to Hasbro's toy collection. And all because the once great Universal Studios is a shadow of its former self, a loathed stepchild handed down from corporation after corporation, trying to please its masters by vomiting out anything that maybe will make money. (And now I hear they're even rebooting their horrific Van Helsing, a nail in their classic monster coffin if ever there was one.)
I'm very glad that there are no WWII heroes left who will likely see Battleshit. Remember when Hollywood would make war movies? We are so cushioned now from real movies about real war that we rely on videogame Calls of Duties and alien invasions to stir any notion of what soldiers do. It's really a pathetic trend. One could make the argument that our mighty military no longer has real-life villains worthy of Tom Cruise and Will Smith to fight in their jets and submarines, but studios don't even try because they know their audience is so dumbed-down now, so schooled on video games and CGI battles, that it's pointless to bother. Leave that stuff to HBO. This modern audience prefers the XBox version of war. Hell, I don't think we'd even get a Tony Scott film like Crimson Tide or John McTiernan's The Hunt For Red October greenlit again. The suits would balk at the lack of aliens and giant robots. And cardboard heroes. There was a time when summer gave us the depth of leading men like Sean Connery and Denzel Washington. Now we get Shia LeBeouf and Taylor Kitsch.
With each film like Battleshit that does makes money, film loses its sense of artistry, and yeah, we're all culpable to some agree. True film snobs want to blame three decades of Luca$ and $pielberg dominance for the soul-sucking of cinema, furthered by their proteges, the Bays, Emmerichs and Ratners of the world. But now, it just seems really, really worse since the appearance of Jar-Jar Binks 13 years ago. We're just setting ourselves up for the inevitable critical mass needed for Mike Judge's Idiocracy to come to fruition. Next up, "ASS: THE MOVIE". Just a big ass on screen. Farting and launching CGI missiles.
