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Jeb Stuart Thurmond Jeb Stuart Thurmond is offline
Didn't write the Bible, just obeys it
 

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Thumbs up Movie Review: BATTLESHIP - good entertainment, and a great business lesson - 01-19-2013, 07:41 PM

Most board games, and in particular Battleship, are perfect examples of capitalism at it's best. Copywrite a game invented by someone else that requires nothing but two pieces of grid paper and two pencils, then charge a hundred bucks for it. Update every couple of years: "electronic talking Battleship!" Then come up with themes: "Wine Snob Battleship!"

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Because if you're drunk you might not notice that this game involves no thinking whatsoever. You just buy everything. Or maybe that's the whole point - more capitalist genius.
Board games mesh perfectly with that other innovation of capitalist efficiency, Christmas gift-giving. After all, capitalism is all about economic decisions being best made by the person effected, about rational SELF-interest. And what's a getter way to do that than by having someone else try to guess what you want? So most board games are bought in December, played once if at all, then forgotten in time for the next Christmas shopping season. It's like a licence to print money - and that's all it is, printing, as you charge 40$ for a piece of printed cardboard and some bits of plastic similar that cost 85 cents in a Kinder surprise (which also comes with free chocolate).

Another thing board games mesh with well is American capitalism's proudest export, the Hollywood summer blockbuster. A true marvel of efficiency, blockbusters combine plot recycling, free equipment (and much of the scriptwriting) provided by the military (the free-market part of the government), and a something-for-everyone attitude that may not satisfy anyone, but still gets everyone through the door, and not experiencing buyer's remorse until after everyone has bought popcorn.
  • For the kids, you've got explosions, shootings, and dirty words (which, like the plot, seem fresh and new in their eyes)
  • For the women, you've got men who are jocular and yet still say things like "I love you, you're smart…." (Reality to Hollywood: yes, it's true looks aren't everything. Men want a women with good character. Smart is often useful. But we don't fall in love with it.)
  • For the film snobs the first 3rd of the film is nothing but pointless drama, unless it's an action movie, in which case the plot is confusing mess of flashbacks and double-crossings. There might even be subtitles, for people who would rather be reading a book than watching a movie.
  • For the guys who are paying for most of it - that is, the military - you have the military doing what it does best. Since it turns out that's not fighting terrorism let alone nation-building, so that leaves us with alien invasions. Hey, you can't prove our military ISN'T awesome at fighting aliens. Obviously that's what they've been planning for, since no sane country would spend half it's budget to fight a few thousand guys who live in caves and last attacked us with box-cutters.

So the end result is like sharing a stew made from organic kale and goji-berries with deep-fried jalapeños and smothered with tutti-frutti icing sprinkled with pop-rocks. By the time you find out it's not the sum of it's parts, it's too late to get everyone to turn back.

Forget what your high-school business class taught you, the goal of business is not to satisfy customers, since satisfied people don't need to buy anything. The real goal of business - the True Business Cycle - is to sell the same unsatisfying thing with different packaging - whether a game, a movie, or politicians (this is why we say that capitalism and democracy go together. Though obviously now and then politicians forget how to do business so they have to be removed by generalissimos until we get a new generation of politicians who understand the True Business Cycle.)

Okay, on to the movie. So, it's an alien invasion movie on the high seas. If you liked the premise of The Abyss - in which humans discover that aliens have been living under the oceans for all of human history - you're an idiot who has set himself up for disappointment. Efficient storytelling means recycling century-old stories written by foreigners (in this case, War of the Worlds by Briton H. G. Welles.) Taking credit (and money) from foreigner's work is the American genius, it's what makes America great - especially when we copywrite our looted ideas. Thus if a Mexican uses a recipe from Taco Bell we can sue them. It's as American as Apple pie (also invented by the British). That's capitalist efficiency.

The Abyss was an inefficient film, squandering creative American brainpower on writing that could have been better spent on intellectual property lawyers to sue the people you copied the idea from.

Ok, ok, I'm sorry for the economics lecture, I promise I'll talk about the movie now. It starts with your Standard Operating Procedure military-sponsored film, in which an unemployed drunk joins the military and cleans up, causing people to respect him. No, they're not using flashbacks, they really seem to think it happens in that order.

Just how much of a loser is this character? Well, in the first scene he tries to pick up a women by fetching a burrito for her. Now, in real life women can't stand this sort of submissive, type-B personality behavior, but in this case he still pleases her because he commits a series of crimes in the process. This reminds me of Halo and half of the FPS video game that young men play today - games in which a male character goes around shooting things while a woman tells him what to do "Go here! Fetch that! Good boy! Who's a good boy!" It's obvious the media is training a generation of males to enjoy being the mindless - though violent - servants of women.

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"Go this way! Go that way! Fetch me a sandwich!" I for one do NOT welcome our new overlords.
The next scene happens at Pearl Harbor, where a Jap sneak attacks the hero, using the cover of a soccer game to kick him in the face. Nice to see that the Military (at least, it's Hollywood branch) understands that The Japanese Never Change.

Then the hero is in trouble with his boss. I'm really starting to identify with this hero, he has the exact qualities Americans idolize: he's good at his job, when he does it, which is rarely because he has "terrible character" (or, as we call it, "self-interest"). It's contrasted perfectly with the robotic Japanese, just look at them clapping in unison and all.

So, after a half-hour of trying to please the ladies and-or film snobs, the aliens arrive, in five spaceships, though one of them collides with a satellite and is destroyed. A million miles to manoeuvre and they still crash - these aliens have the driving skills of Asians. The rest crash with Hong Kong, 9/11-style though this time their spaceships survive. Maybe they used some kind of hi-tech shield which wasn't switched on during the unexpected satellite collision. (That's half the fun of stupid movies - coming up with ways to explain all the plot holes. Reviewers/film snobs have yet to discover this, but that would mean giving up their elitist assumption that people watch these movies out of stupidity.)

Oh yeah, it's all NASA's fault, those bunch of scruffy, twitchy nerds tried communicating with aliens, and as every republican/hollywood scriptwriter knows, talking to foreigners (aka "apologizing") is bad.

So far so good - a highly efficient use of plot recycling, like 95% of sci-fi- movies and games: inventors/creative people cause problems, and only violence solves them. Just like real life.

Now we see the alien technology - you know it's high-tech, because it has lots of moving parts for no apparent reason, too much information in the user interface, and general needless complexity all-around. As for actual capabilities - who cares? As I said in my economics lecture, good products only provide the illusion of progress, since creating a product that actually solves the problem will only put you out of business. Like how all our word-processing could be done on a 286 from the 1980's (or a typewriter, if we didn't get all snobby about spelling errors) yet people spend thousands of bucks every few years to buy another, shinier computer where the only new thing is the bugs and glitches.

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Next breakthrough for the technology industry: machines that walk through swamps in high-heels. Every year we'll introduce a new one that can take an extra step before getting stuck in the mud. No, better, they'll get stuck more but they'l be shinier and the user interface will be more colorful. The only reason I'm not patenting this business plan is because I'm sure some other patent troll has beat me to it)
Finally, after 45 minutes, we get our first battle scenes. It's actually amazingly realistic.

No, seriously. It shows exactly what would happen if today's navy got sucker-punched by someone with the actual technological capabilities of, say, the Japanese fleet from 1905. We would get our butts kicked.

You see, after ww2 the navy and air force were rebuilt for the sole purpose of fighting a nuclear war, on the assumption that we'd never be involved with any other type of war. Thus our equipment has little raw firepower (when you're launching nukes you don't need to launch a lot) and no armor (since no amount of armor can stop a nuke). The Korean War proved this assumption false more than 60 years ago, yet nobody has figured it out yet. Especially silly, since now everyone seems to have forgotten that nuclear weapons even exist - including the aliens.

As I've said, people only pay attention to the illusion of progress, not actual capabilities. Nobody, whether as a customer or a taxpayer, cares if your navy can be sunk by Kaiser Wilhelm's fleet, as long as it has enough sleek lines and bleepy computer screens. Only by paying attention to this fact will you get as far in business as I have.

Next the aliens attack Hawaii directly. I'm actually starting to sympathize more with the aliens than with the "hero": their overly-complex technology shows excellent business sense, and of course they're blowing up Obama's home town, Hawaii. They even follow American policy on targeting civilians, when an alien killbot encounters a kid playing baseball. It decides to spare him - and instead, blow up a bridge, killing (offscreen) a whole bunch of other civilians. That's how we roll - we don't target civilians, we just use 2000 pound bombs to target the building they're in, the bridges they're on, and now and then the shoes on their feet. It's your fault for bringing your kids to the battlefield, Hawaiians.

An hour and a half in, the black guy is still alive, and the Japanese guy says he learned to shoot guns at summer camp when he was 12. So is Hollywood is helping cover-up Japan's gun control regime? No time to think now, all these explosions aren't going to watch themselves. Oh, and the fighter jocks even show up, after they were needed - just like in real life.

Spoiler alert: lots of stuff explodes. The end.

Two thumbs up.


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Last edited by Jeb Stuart Thurmond; 01-19-2013 at 09:59 PM.
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