"Battleship": Game? What Game?

My Red Box rentals have slowed considerably.

I gave myself a Blue Ray player for my birthday that has WiFi. I joined NetFlix and pretty much have just downloaded movies that way.

Part of justifying the $8 I spend on NetFlix each and every month is not spending $2.50 every Saturday night (Italian Night at Casa de Heaps) renting from Red Box. I have managed to adhere to this policy quite successfully.

I also joined Amazon Prime. That's another $6 a month. I got a month's free trial for that and will probably cancel it before I actually have to start paying for it. One of the reasons I joined was that you can get free two-day shipping on some items purchased on the site. To date, I have only found one thing I had any interest in ordering that qualified for the "Prime" shipping. It's on back order and I hope it ships before I cancel the membership.

Otherwise Prime is more of a membership thing that allows me to download $3 or $4 rentals. Red Box is cheaper.

I wanted to see "2016" and rather than spend $4 at Amazon to download it, I spent $1.20 at Red Box. As long as I was going to Red Box, I decided to find a second title and rented "Battleship."

"Battleship" didn't do well at the box office. No doubt its tie-in to the game Battleship didn't help. I read one review that said if the producers had chosen a different name and downplayed any relationship to the game, it probably would have done much better.

In reality, the movie's only relationship to the game is that Hasbro evidently underwrote a significant piece of it. There was one battle sequence where the good guys used a Battleship-game-like grid to attack the bad guys, but I would have never made the correlation had the movie been called something else.

It's strictly a sci-fi escapism film totally implausible in virtually every respect.

Here's the 411: Scientists on earth discover another earth-like planet in a far-off solar system that may support life. They establish a communication system in Hawaii to beam radio signals to this planet. A couple of years later, residents of this planet arrive in the Pacific to take over or destroy -- we don't know for sure because they never communicate with earth -- the planet.

Our hero in all of this is a goof-off who is only in the Navy because it was that or go to jail. His brother, a naval officer, somehow gets him into the Navy and assigned to the Pacific fleet in which he commands a destroyer. Our hero runs the battle room in another destroyer.

The brother is "Erick" from the "True Blood" TV series on HBO. It's the first time I've seen him in any other role.

I have gal pals who will see this movie -- that otherwise they'd never waste their time on -- solely because this guy is in it.

When his ship is shot out from under him, our hero nearly single handedly defeats the aliens by transferring what's left of his crew to the USS Missouri. Working with several former members of the Missouri's crew that work as tour guides for the ship, our hero -- no idea who the actor playing the part is and not motivated enough to research it -- defeats the highly advanced aliens, wins the girl and gets a promotion.

Despite my less than enthusiastic description of the film, I liked "Battleship." Lots of action and a movie ideal for Blue Ray.

It was well worth the $1.20.