Film / Battleship

The battle for Earth begins at sea.

Battleship is a sci-fi action film released in 2012, directed by Peter Berg and starring Liam Neeson, Taylor Kitsch, Brooklyn Decker, Alexander Skarsgård, and Rihanna, very loosely based on the board game Battleship. Yes, the one with red and white pegs and a grid and "you sunk my battleship!"

The movie opens with Alex Hopper (Kitsch), a drunk, unemployed loser. He's dragged into the U.S. Navy by his straitlaced brother Stone (Skarsgård), who hopes it will give him some direction in life. Five years later, Alex is a junior officer, with plans to ask the Admiral for his daughter's hand in marriage. Unfortunately, the Admiral (Neeson) dislikes Alex both as an officer and a gentleman, and he intends to have Alex discharged by the end of the next voyage.

Said voyage is a huge, multinational war game, off of the coast of Hawaii. Before the exercises have a chance to get underway, however, the fleet is interrupted by a bunch of alien objects crashing into the ocean. The objects reveal themselves to be a squadron of alien war machines. Their intentions aren't clear, but whatever they're planning, the aliens aren't here to play games.

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Battleship provides examples of:

• The Ace: Multiple:
  • Stone Hopper, when compared to Alex; not only does he have his shit squared away, his destroyer has won the Battle E numerous times.
  • Alex Hopper made himself a CIC Officer in five years, and improbably brilliant (and lucky) tactical officer in general. However, he is a pure distilled jackass until hammered multiple times with failures (including one that almost cost his entire career, and another that cost many Japanese sailors their lives).
• Action Girl: Raikes, all the way, and she's based on Jacqueline Carrizosa, who helped train Rihanna. Samantha is more of an Action Survivor girl.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Lt. Col. Canales is played by real life U.S. Army Col. Gregory Gadson. Like his character, he lost both legs in Iraq. He was also an honorary co-captain of the New York Giants when they won Super Bowl 42, and wears their hat throughout the movie.
  • Many a fan with recognize Stone's usage of the term Stay Frosty.
  • A lot of extras are playing themselves (or at least, their role). It's also Backed by the Pentagon.
• Adaptation Expansion: Of Battleship, as noted. There is a preexisting spin-off game about an alien invasion, but those aliens are completely different.
• Advertising by Association: The film was proudly declared as coming "From Hasbro, the company that brought you Transformers", in spite of neither film being actually made by the same studio ^note Hasbro's film division at the time just developed the concepts for other studios. Also, they didn't create the original Battleship game, they just bought out the owners.
• Alien Invasion: The premise of the film.
• All of Them: From the final trailer, in answer to an implied question of which weapons were wanted:
  Warning Red. Weapons tight. I want everything loaded.
• All There in the Manual: The novelization clears up a lot about the aliens. For example, they're called the "Regents", and the reason they don't just smash the humans outright is that they're testing them.
• Always Someone Better: Stone, to Alex. Until the end....
• Anti-Villain: The aliens are an advanced scout and presumably here to ultimately conquer the planet, but they go out of their way to minimize or avoid human casualties wherever possible, even letting otherwise hostile humans go if they deem them to not be a threat, and their main plan is just to make contact with their home after their communication ship is accidentally destroyed after colliding with a satellite. Whether their whole race is like this or it is just this particular group (who are speculated to be scientists rather than military) is another matter however, and while they are reluctant to use violence they still cut off Hawaii from the rest of the world to achieve their goals.
• Apathetic Citizens: There's a strange and quite visible force field over Hawaii, and all contact with the outside world is down, but when the aliens hit infrastructure and military bases, the traffic appears to be ordinary rush hour clutter, not panicked attempted evacuation, there's a Little League baseball game going on, and the military base seems to be in routine operation, not any kind of alert.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • Averted. The armor of one of the aliens does a very good job of soaking up assault rifle and pistol bullets with no sign of damage to him.
  • Played straight with the Missouri, oddly enough. The deck armor and turret armor don't do any good against the pegs.
• Artistic License – Military:
  • Likely for the sake of landlubbers watching, the characters avoid nearly all nautical terms which would be second nature to any sailor (using left and right instead of port and starboard).
  • The CO and XO of the ship being taken out with a single hit, instead of them being at different battle stations to avoid just this scenario. (though given the size/placement of the explosions, its possible both battle stations were destroyed)
  • Hopper, as weapons officer, would not be the next in line to command the ship after the CO and XO.
• Artistic License – Ships:
  • None of the American ships shown in the movie was involved in the RIMPAC exercise in 2012. The Japanese destroyer Myoko, however, was part of the exercise that year.
  • Zigzagged with the portrayal of the CIWS. While the real Sampson had one emplacement, the actual John Paul Jones had two.
  • Crossing over with Artistic License – Engineering, clubhauling^*turning a ship suddenly by dropping its anchor on the side that you wish to turn and using the ship's momentum to swing around an Iowa-class battleship is completely impossible: even if you used all four anchors, the ship is too massive and would be moving too fast for the chains to hold up, and more to the point, the chains simply aren't long enough to reach the sea floor in the middle of the Pacific anyway.
  • Bringing a museum ship up to fighting capability in under a day is impossible. Even assuming that live ammo and fuel are stored onboard strains belief. In real life, it took two years to recommission an Iowa-class battleship (though that did include upgrading and installing new weapons and systems). Firing the boilers alone takes the better part of day.
  • The scene where the main characters struggle to carry a 2,500lb 16-inch armor-piercing shell from the aft magazine to the forward turrets is rather ridiculous. Transferring main battery ammunition between the fore and aft magazines was a common enough operation that the designers of the Iowa-class battleships included an overhead-rail trolley system in the central "Broadway" passageway to do it quickly and safely. The ship also has multiple shell dollies for moving the big shells around the compartment, loading them onto the ready racks & ammo hoists, etc. Having eight guys try to deadlift one and lug it 500 feet is both slower and asking to kill somebody.
• Ascended Meme:
  • A variation of the classic line is uttered towards the end of the film.
    Veteran: They ain't gonna sink this battleship, no way.
  • In the novel, Alex almost gets it out after losing the John Paul Jones, but is cut off at the last word. Of course, he was in fact talking about a destroyer at the time...
• Autobots, Rock Out!: The Missouri Lock-and-Load Montage to the tune of "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC. Considering the relationship with the Trope Namer...
• Awesome, but Impractical: The battleship Missouri in a modern navy. As Alex explains to a little boy taking a tour, the battleship is essentially a dinosaur fossil even compared to ships like his much smaller destroyer. Battleships were made obsolete by aircraft, missiles, and advanced targeting systems — three things that had been nullified by the aliens, thus making it more effective for direct combat than the destroyers. In fact, the buoy targeting method is a more advanced version of how battleship targeting was traditionally performed. But somehow Alex forgot that in the 1980s, Iowa-class battleships were upgraded with then-modern radars, missile weaponry, and active defenses, and were pretty useful in Desert Storm operation. Obsolete, but nothing like dinosaur fossils.
• Badass Boast: When an alien soldier approaches Sam's stalled jeep, Mick - a former champion boxer missing both his legs - says simply:
  Mick: I got this.
• "Back to Camera" Pose: * The poster◊ features Hopper looking up in awe at the alien battleship with his back to the audience.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Earth sends out a signal in the hope of contacting other intelligent life in the galaxy. Well, that life comes here and promptly begins to kick butt.
• Belly-Scraping Flight: One of the military base's helicopters almost evades an oncoming shredder drone, lifting off fast enough that the killer machine only tears a series of gashes in its undercarriage. Too bad for the helicopter pilots that the drone had a spiky whip-tail in reserve, with which to demolish the chopper's tail and send it crashing.
• Big Brother Instinct: Stone goes out of his way to take care of Alex and help him shape up his life, even letting the latter crash on his couch.
• Big Brother Mentor: Commander Stone Hopper, Alex's older brother, who's been trying to rein him in his entire life, eventually dragging him into the Navy.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • The Gunship Rescue by the Australian F/A-18 Hornets.
  • The aliens pull off one of these when the humans manage to capture one of them.
  • The geeky and wimpy scientist coming in from out of nowhere with a briefcase-to-the-head for the alien about to kill the downed Mick.
• Black Dude Dies First: The John Paul Jones captain is on the bridge when the aliens fire, killing him and three other crew members first.
• Blinded by the Light: The aliens have really low light tolerance, which comes in very handy when unarmored humans have to fight them. Their helmets were shown to incorporate heavily tinted visors.
• Boom, Headshot!: Raikes does this to an alien marine. With the five-inch gun. At point-blank range!
• Bottomless Magazines: In the final battle, USS Missouri fires her sixteen-inch guns several times in the span of a few seconds, only stopping so that Alex Hopper can shout "Reload!" The actual rate of fire for such guns is around two rounds per gun per minute. Also, there is no such thing as an automatic 16-inch gun; rather, they are reloaded after every shot.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: It is repeatedly stated that Alex has a lot of potential but doesn't use it.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: Battleships have been out of military use for decades, so fulfilling the title in a modern times movie necessarily involved this. In this case, it's more like breaking out the museum, as the battleship in question is the USS Missouri, which currently serves out its retirement as a floating historical museum and memorial at Pearl Harbor.
• Brick Joke: Alex and chicken burritos.
• The Cavalry: Just when it seems that Alex, Nagata, and Co have sailed their last mission against the aliens the armed might of the Pacific Rim navies comes to the rescue in the form Australian fighter jets blowing the enemy up.
• Celebrity Paradox: Winked at: the novelization opens with young Alex and Stone playing a grid based naval warfare game called "Broadsides".
• Changed My Mind, Kid: A nerdy scientist decides he wants nothing to do with the fight, but then saves Mick out of nowhere by smashing an alien in the face with a metal suitcase.
• Chekhov's Gun: The laptop, and USS Missouri. (Indeed, Chekhov's battleship.)
• Chekhov's Gunman: The retired veteran crewmen of the Missouri.
• Chekhov's Skill: Mick's boxing career. Also, Alex's surprising memory for literary quotations (and utter failure to understand The Art of War).
• Cool Ship: A lot. There's the Arleigh-Burke-class missile destroyers, their Japanese copy counterparts, the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan... but the coolest of them all is the USS Missouri. And those are just the human ships.
• Combat Pragmatist: This seems to be humanity's big advantage in the film, up to and including using a five-inch cannon in a melee.
• Conveniently Empty Buildings: Averted; early in the film one of the alien ships gets knocked off course and the debris rains down onto Hong Kong. Most of the pieces just barely buzz by and land in the harbor without hitting any structures, but one chunk takes out the top section of the Bank of China and causes it to crash to the street. It's mentioned later in the film that this alone caused 25,000 casualties.
• Cowardly Lion: Cal, who "acquires" enough courage to retrieve his equipment from the aliens' lair, and later uses it to knock down the alien soldier attacking Mick.
  Cal: (to the trapped Sam) Calm down, okay? I'm gonna frigging save you!
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The first battle with the aliens. Due to the shield jamming their missile guidance systems, they're forced to engage the alien ships with only their five-inch guns, which are piddly next to what the aliens can dish out. Both the Sampson and Myoko are destroyed very quickly one after the other, the former with all hands.
• Curse Cut Short: A few times, usually with a naval gun firing. Most memorable of the lot would be this:
  USS Missouri Veteran: Let's drop some lead on these mother-
• Determinator:
  • Alex, delivering the burrito. (Also against the aliens. The crew of the John Paul Jones follow suit.)
  • And then we have the Scottish farmer in The Stinger.
    Jimmy: If Jimmy says he's gettin' in, he's gettin' in!
• Did Not Think This Through: While hyperventilating, Cal tells Sam and Mick that he warned the U.S. government that sending a signal to deep space would have dire consequences, and that any alien race advanced enough to make the journey to Earth would not be arriving with peaceful intentions.
  I told them that something like this would happen, that if something did find us, it would be like Columbus and the Indians, or the Incas and the Conquistadors, and they said, "Oh, no, they'll be sweet..."
• Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: Alex Hopper is sent with two others on a Zodiac to get a closer look at the alien structure when the fleet spots it, and one of his companions cautions him against getting closer when he finds a surface he can walk on. Naturally, he walks over and puts his hand on a wall, apparently initiating a reaction and launching him fifty-some feet backwards.
• Epic Launch Sequence: The eponymous warship, USS Missouri, is given a proper revival when it's needed for the final assault.
• Establishing Character Moment: Alex delivering the burrito to Samantha, both establishing that he's a drunken idiot, and that he's a Determinator and Indy Ploy artist par excellence.
• Everything Sensor: Standard issue for the aliens. They can detect cars, aircraft, beating hearts, highway supports... and apparently even horseshoes.
• Exact Words:
  Nagata: We're gonna die.
  Stone: We are gonna die. You're gonna die... I'm gonna die. We're all gonna die... Just not today.
• Excuse Plot: The first half-hour of the movie is a fine example for this trope.
• Eye Awaken: A variant. Alex and the others capture an unconscious alien. He pulls open one of its eyelids to reveal a completely dilated pupil. When he shines a light into the eye, the pupil suddenly narrows down to a thin slit as the alien regains consciousness.
• A Father to His Men: Admiral Shane tells his superiors to sod off after being told that the best strategy they can come up with is to keep slamming more jets into the shield in the hopes that one of them will somehow get through.
• Fire-Forged Friends: By the end of the movie, Alex and Nagata have set aside their differences.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Alex (Foolish) and Stone (Responsible).
• Foreign Cuss Word: "Kuso!"
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: They're moving pretty quickly, but if you pause the film, you can see that the aliens' munitions are shaped exactly like the pegs in the board game.
• Gatling Good:
  • Raikes mans a Minigun on the rigid inflatable boat sent to investigate the alien craft.
  • The Phalanx CIWS turrets on the ships also provide Gatling action.
• The General's Daughter: Well, admiral's daughter in this case. And she's caught the eye of Alex, a Lieutenant. Her father does not approve of him.
• Glass Cannon: The Arleigh-Burke and Kongo-class guided missile destroyers pack a punch if they hit, but can't take a beating. Justified, in the fact that modern anti-ship weapons are so powerful that avoiding being hit (via speed or active defenses) is a far better strategy for surviving than heavy armor. The aliens just happen to be further enough up the Tech scale that they can defeat most of these defenses.
• Girls with Guns: Raikes is hardly ever seen without one, and they range from a pistol to sixteen-inch naval artillery.
• Gondor Calls for Aid:
  • What the aliens are trying to do for most of the movie. After their communications vessel is destroyed after colliding with a satellite, their entire goal is to secure the Deep Space communications facility in Hawaii to send out a distress signal.
  • On the human side, the chief was pointing out that he has no clue how to get the Missouri back in working order, nor a crew to man her even if he did. Cue a bunch of old veterans who volunteer to be the crew of the Missouri once more.
• Gunship Rescue: The Australian Hornets that land the final blow on the alien mothership.
• Handicapped Badass: Mick, who still manages to kick alien ass despite having lost both legs. Pun not intended.
• Hero-Tracking Failure: Defied as shown by the alien targeting computer which properly anticipates USS Missouri's path, then inverted via anchor-dropping battleship drift as mentioned above in a really cool break from acceptable physics.
• Humanoid Aliens: The invaders are basically oversized, pale humans with gecko-like eyes, goatees made of something resembling porcupine quills, and claw-like Four-Fingered Hands. Revisiting the film 10 years later, many have drawn comparisons between the aliens and Craig from the early beta of Halo Infinite.
• Humans Are Warriors: Especially the old ones!
• "I Know What We Can Do" Cut: Alex is asked how they're going to get a two-ton artillery shell over to the battleship's remaining intact turrets. Alex thinks for a second, then we cut to the men transporting it the only way they can: by hand.
• Idiot Hero: Alex begins the movie as this, but he gets better. McShane even points out that he's a smart kid who keeps doing really dumb things. We never see him demonstrate much intelligence, though.
• Improbable Infant Survival: The Wheel of Death examines, then turns away from a kid playing baseball.
• In Name Only: The board game is petty spare on details so this is inevitable. It does have two nods to the source; the alien canister bombs that embed themselves into ship decks before exploding much like the pegs from the board game, and a night battle where combat from the human perspective is remarkably grid based.
• Insufficiently Advanced Alien:
  • The "marines" are only armed with a hand spike from what we see, and their ships and ground troops can be beaten by a 1940s warship and a retired ex-boxer Colonel Badass with artificial legs, respectively.
    • Explained in the DVD extras. The aliens are not marines... they are scientists.
  • The alien ships also appear to lack guided weapons beyond those "wheels". They prefer to fight with ballistic explosive shells that spin, for some reason.
• Interchangeable Asian Cultures: Nagata's exasperation at Alex's assumption that The Art of War (a Chinese text) is a pan-Asian text.
• Isn't It Ironic?: The use of "Fortunate Son", a explicitly antiwar Vietnam era song, in a very military-centric movie. Notable record producer Rick Rubin, as music supervisor, ought to have known much better.
• It Can Think:
  • One of the first "Rondos" actually stops and avoids hurting a child.
  • After the John Paul Jones scores a direct hit on the alien ships, the last remaining one starts going Yossarian.
• It Has Been an Honor: Alex and Nagata, staring at the alien mothership, and choosing to stop the alien transmission at the cost of their own lives.
• It's Raining Men: The aliens have one man pods that they launch into a Hawaiian forest in the trailer.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: "What kinda chuck wagon—"
• Killer Yo-Yo: The "Rondos", spinning bladed wheels that can steer, stop and target specific things, with a bladed prehensile "string" for added kick.
• Lead the Target: The alien targeting system does this automatically, showing the Missouri and a green silhouette of her slightly ahead, based on where their computer has calculated she's going to be when the shells hit. Alex's anchor maneuver is designed to stop the ship just as the shells are launched, thereby causing them to overshoot the target, and to bring the Missouri's main guns to bear on the alien ship in an impressive broadside.
• Love at First Sight: Alex first meets his future Fiancée in a bar during his drunken birthday. While he's infatuated with her, she doesn't appear that interested until he fulfills his promise to bring her a chicken burrito, going so far to steal from a store and getting arrested as a result.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The Aegis Combat System allows the missile destroyers to do this... except that the aliens are jamming their radar, and most of their missiles are antiaircraft missiles. The aliens themselves enjoy using this method.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: Often despite having an entire destroyer crew plus whatever sailors they pulled out of the ocean from the other ships.
• Meaningful Name: The John Paul Jones is named after one of the U.S. Navy's determinator pioneers.
• Mickey Mousing: Happens during the Missouri's reactivation. When Lynch topples a claw machine to get access to the door behind it, the sound it makes when it hits the ground is perfectly synced to the "Thun-der" chant from Thunderstruck. Which, admittedly, doesn't actually come into play until later (when the lights in the passage are turned on), but still, props to the guy in post for getting the slow-mo synced up like that.
• Military Alphabet: As to be expected in a modern military film. Also used prominently when the crew are calling out grid coordinates in Nagata's "water displacement" strategy.
• Monumental Damage: An alien craft crash severs the top off the Bank of China building in Hong Kong.
• More Dakka: Both sides of the conflict apply this tactic.
• The Movie: Of the board game. Universal got the rights along with those to several other board games from Hasbro, then sat on them. Hasbro was starting to ask them to pay a penalty for doing nothing with the film rights when Peter Berg came along and offered to direct.
• Ms. Fanservice: Samantha.
• Mythology Gag: The alien bombs sink into the ships like giant pins. Also the alphanumeric Battleship grid.
• Never Hurt an Innocent: The aliens' HUDs show noncombatants in green.
• Noble Demon:
  • One scene in which the aliens do allow the characters to rescue the survivors of the ships they sunk early in the film. They also avoid harming civilians several times. However, they destroy freeways with cars on them, surely causing civilian fatalities, and kill police officers and destroy a Marine base without warning or visible chance to surrender.
  • There's also the alien aboard the JPJ who gives Alex a vision of the aliens' plans (this may count since the alien seems desperate), as well as the alien who lets the scientist go (they may be the same alien).
• Non-Actor Vehicle: Although Rihanna's involvement is very much downplayed.
• No One Gets Left Behind: The aliens rescue one of the their own which was captured by the main characters.
• No Range Like Point-Blank Range:
  • Hopper distracts one of the aliens on the deck of the John Paul Jones while Raikes rotates the 5" gun straight at its head. She fires when the alien is roughly three feet from the gun.
  • Although the sixteen-inch guns of the Missouri can easily engage at over twenty miles away, the battleship is practically spitting distance from the alien craft when they actually attack. Having only a small handful of shells, however, plus an undersized crew they could hardly afford to waste shots getting the range for a longer ranged engagement.
• Not of This Earth: Alien debris is composed of unknown elements (and lawrencium); impressive, since our indications are that everything we haven't identified is extremely unstable. Lawrencium, number 103 on the periodic table, has a half-life of 216 minutes at its most-stable known isotope, and everything above it only gets shorter-lived.
• Novelization: A novelization of the film, written by Peter David, was released in April. It included passages from the aliens' viewpoint and reveals their actual motives.
• The Oner: The destruction of the John Paul Jones from about the point Raikes hits the water to when Stone and Nagata jump off the ship.
• Oh, Crap!: Right as soon as the Sampson was dotted with timed bombs from bow to stern along her entire hull, before it blew up in a huge fireball explosion.
• One Bullet Left: The USS Missouri in the climax; after expending almost all of their 16-inch shells on the alien mothership, the protagonists are left with a choice to use their last remaining shell to either finish off the mothership, or destroy the hijacked signal facility the aliens are using to send a distress signal to their home fleet, at the risk of being destroyed by a final salvo launched from the now-foundering mothership. They ultimately choose the latter, but thankfully a pair of Hornets arrive just in the nick of time to intercept the salvo and finish off the mothership.
• Old Soldier: A whole bunch show up to man the Missouri
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
  • Skarsgård has a few moments like this, particularly in the opening scene. Also Rihanna, especially when she explains her father's view on aliens.
  • Liam Neeson's Irish creeps in, especially when he's telling off the Secretary of Defense.
• Point Defenseless: The CIWS mounts on Sampson, Myoko and John Paul Jones do their best, taking out 5/6 of the initial volleys but in the end there's too much incoming fire to intercept.
• Powder Keg Crowd: The world, once they find out about the aliens, begins rioting. This has absolutely no bearing on the main plot nor story, and is never resolved.
• Power Armor: Standard-issue for the aliens, apparently coming in light and heavy varieties.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner:
  • Cora gets one in as an alien foot soldier standing on the deck of a ship finds itself standing directly in the line of fire of one of the turreted guns.
    "Mahalo, mother—" *BOOM*
  • A veteran manages to one-up her later.
    "Boom."
• Product Placement:
  • Hello, Coca-Cola Zero. Alex drinks it at the beginning of the movie and it is later seen on a mega-screen.
  • When Hopper and his girlfriend are late and trying to find their way onto the battleship, it's just a flimsy excuse to linger overlong on his Ford pickup.
  • The Little League ballpark was plastered with Subway. We even get a closeup of a little girl drinking from a Subway cup. In Canada, however, rival chain Mr. Sub did a tie-in for the movie.
  • Surprisingly averted with the Milton Bradley board game itself, which appears nowhere in the movie. The novelization has some characters playing the bland-name equivalent, "Broadsides".
• Promotion to Parent: Though not stated outright, it's implied with the way Stone lectures and shouts at Alex in a way that's more paternal than fraternal, even scolding him about wasting his birthday wish on a girl.
• Rank Up: The first time we see Alex, he's an unemployed and drunk, and burgles a convenience store for a chicken burrito to impress a girl. Five years later, he's a Lieutenant and Tactical Action Officer in command of the Combat Information Center, before landing in the Captain's chair. At the end of the movie, he's promoted to Lieutenant Commander.
• Realpolitik: Captain Nagata reveals that for twenty years Japan has been preparing contingency plans for another war with America, including using tsunami buoys to track ships by their water displacement instead of radar. Hopper mildly calls him out on it, and Nagata shrugs, "rough world."
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: After Alex gets arrested and tazed in the opening scene, Stone comes in and starts yelling about how he was screwing around with his commander's daughter, which therefore messes with his job, and his life, and he's through with just letting Alex repeatedly go through with stupid stuff.
• Recycled In Space: Battle: Los Angeles/Transformers (2007) in the ocean!
• The Rival: Nagata.
• Rolling Attack: The aliens' "wheels" which can chew through warships.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something:
  • Lt. Alex Hopper doesn't do delegating. Being a junior officer, he's sent to scout the alien spaceship; later, when the aliens board John Paul Jones, he's leading the team searching for them, even though he's by then the acting Captain. In the novelization, he even notes that he shouldn't be doing so.
  • Likewise, it is Captain Nagata who is required to "play Battleship", rather than one of his own weapons officers, though it's likely most of his CIC crew are dead, given the placement of the hit on Myoko.
• Rule of Cool: Turning a 45,000-ton battleship with a anchor in a club-hauling maneuver? Not realistic, but definitely cool. Similarly with Alex, Lynch, Nagata, two old veterans and a small Japanese officer carrying a 1,900-pound HC shell.
• Sacrificial Lion: Stone. The more responsible brother who gets Alex to start shaping up, only to die in the first few minutes of the first battle with the aliens when the Sampson is lost with all hands after previously beginning to take on water.
• Save Sat: An accidental one. The aliens' communication ship collides with a random satellite orbiting Earth while traveling at interstellar speed and crashes into Hong Kong. Sure, it's bad for the Chinese, but the fact that the aliens don't have a ready means of letting their homeworld know that Earth is ripe for the taking is the only reason humanity even has a chance.
• Scary Black Man: Lieutenant Colonel Mick Canales, despite being a Handicapped Badass, is able to take out an alien in unarmed combat.
• See the Whites of Their Eyes: Missouri engages the alien ship at close enough range that they not only can see each other visually, the shells can be fired directly at the alien ship without having to go through a ballistic arc.
• Sequel Hook: A lingering shot on another officer's badge hints that Alex might join the Navy SEALs and at least one alien is still alive in Scotland.
• Serkis Folk: The aliens.
• Shout-Out: Frequently, often by the characters.
  • For example, Alex's attempt to get a chicken burrito from a closed store to impress Sam is a beat-for-beat reference to this memetic idiot. Except Alex can just use the emergency exit, he eventually realizes.
  • Petty Officer Lynch is referred to as "Beast" throughout.
  • "Fire everything!"
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The movie's very jingoistic and pro-military. The song chosen for the credits? "Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival, a notable antiwar song.
• Starring Special Effects
• Stealth Parody:
  • Maybe. Was this an actual invasion, or a First Contact botched by human belligerence? The novelization says it was an actual invasion, but the film is a bit ambiguous.
  • The fact that this is a movie based on a plotless board game and plays itself completely straight may lead some to believe that it's this.
• The Stinger: Post-credits is a scene in what looks like Scotland of a group of people trying to open a pod which fell from the sky, only to pull back when an alien hand from the inside starts to pull it open.
• Stock Sound Effects: In a way — many of the sound effects from Transformers can be heard in this movie (not surprising, what with Hasbro owning both properties).
• Stuff Blowing Up: Yes. Very much so.
• Team Power Walk: Performed by the U.S. Navy veterans when they come to the aid of the JPJ's survivors in getting the Missouri back into fighting shape.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Alex and Nagata dislike each other immensely, and Nagata blames him for the loss of his ship and his men. Their cooperation is quite reluctant, but they both get better.
• Telepathy: The touch of an alien's hand causes a vision of what's on its mind.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • Artillery cannon. Headshot. Justified in that small arms proved useless against the alien's armor.
  • When the aliens blow up the Sampson, they do so with about three dozen shells.
• Those Were Only Their Scouts: It turns out those aliens that landed on Earth was just armed advanced scouts who were sent there for a scout mission. Whatever their actual military ships and soldiers are, they might able to conquer Earth easily if it weren't for the main characters.
• Title Drop: Though the word "battleship" is spoken a few times in the film, the one that most counts as a Title Drop is when determinator Hopper says, "We've got a Battleship."
• Trading Bars for Stripes: Alex starts the film being arrested for breaking and entering, and joins the military. This was banned by act of Congress at the Defense Department's request after Vietnam.
• Twenty Minutes with Jerks: Heavy emphasis on 'jerks'. Little happens for over twenty minutes.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Averted by tough gunner Cora Raikes.
• Villainous Valor: The aliens definitely have several examples of this. Despite their advanced technology, they are obviously Out-manned and Out-gunned by the rest of humanity (the Barrier they put up is for their own protection rather then to keep the heroes isolated) and they spend most of the movie trying to send out a distress signal. Then there's the Rescue mission they pull when the humans capture one of them and it's not difficult to see the desperation in the crew of the Main Gunship trying to take out the Missouri when the latter has a gun aimed at their ground team.
• The War Room: The Combat Information Center on John Paul Jones, where much of the fighting and planning takes place from.
• What Does She See in Him?: What does Sam see in Alex? The Admiral is damned if he knows, and tells Alex as much.
• Whatever Happened to the Mouse?: The navies of several nations evidently spend an entire night just sitting there staring at the force field. The team in Washington and the mainland doesn't seem to be up to much, either; they're pretty much dropped out of the plot halfway through.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: The aliens avoid killing anyone who isn't a threat even if they were hostile just a moment ago. Their plan would have succeeded if they bothered to destroy the John Paul Jones during the initial engagement. A similar event occurs when the scientist is confronted by an alien scientist inside his base but is let go without harm.
• You Are in Command Now: Alex finds himself in command of the USS John Paul Jones after The Captain and the Executive Officer are killed; as Tactical Action Officer, he's next in the chain of command. (It was implied that all the other officers were killed in the attack. This is why the Master Chief is advising the Lieutenant about abandoning his need for revenge and picking up survivors. This turning away from the conflict kept Jones from remaining an alien target.)
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: As they are preparing to snipe the alien ship's bridge, Hopper asks Captain Nagata where he learned to shoot. Nagata replies at summer camp, when he was 12.

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