Battleship

Wasn't expecting to find a social democratic aesthetic at work in the latest alien invasion flick, Peter Berg's Battleship, but it's there, disguised in a maritime cloak, paying respect to multicultural nautical subjects, and demonstrating how an inclusive team excels.

As if the spirit of Battleship Potemkin is alive and well and theorizing what the Soviet Union's navy would have looked like after a century of reforms inspired by the courageous mutiny, distancing itself from its revolutionary heritage by codifying and transferring its content to 21st century American propaganda.

To battle a plutocratic blitzkrieg.

Can the aliens in Battleship be legitimately thought of as plutocrats?

Well, as environmental laws are repealed or gutted and scientific research is ignored in favour of religio-economic fanaticism (the misguided belief that the free market can do no wrong), the planet (or Canada at least) becomes more and more polluted. The 1% have the means through which to 'purify' their resources by purchasing expensive speciality ethically produced items without using credit excessively.  If fracking ruins their neighbourhood/district/region's water supply, they can move, easily, potentially beforehand after setting up the extraction.  Keeping abreast with technological advances, they can purchase or commission devices that can decontaminate their water even if they do stay while mitigating additional toxic effects.

The aliens who land in Battleship are technologically advanced, possess suits that shield them from that to which they cannot acclimatize (while protecting them from critical repercussions), are uninterested in the concerns of the citizens whom their policies disturb, and are using the military to pursue interplanetary colonialism.  

Sounds like fundamental plutocratic behaviour to me.

The international sailors who confront them however represent different ethnicities, socio-economic contingencies, genders, historical periods, and physical disabilities.

It's a well rounded group.  

They have no armour to protect them from the polluted Earth and must collegially improvise a strategic plan.

Not to naively present this social aesthetic as being ideally fine and dandy.

Before the invasion takes place egos collide and disorder persists.

Yet after a reason to work towards a collective goal presents itself, unity is restored.

The hierarchy within is troublesome yet look at how inclusive it is. Everyone has a voice regardless of rank whose logic is taken into consideration. When Lieutenant Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) suddenly finds himself in command and must make an immediate decision, his subordinate isn't afraid to challenge him in the pursuit of an alternative objective. Hopper even relinquishes command when it becomes clear that Japanese Captain Yugi Nagata (Tadanobu Asano) is a more suited candidate.

The fact that the confrontation takes place within a force field which separates the combatants from the world at large suggests that Battleship does indeed present a popularized plutocratic/social democratic dialectic insofar as these elements have been isolated and subjectified within an impenetrable ideological vacuum (let's find a way to represent these opposing approaches by creating a fictional polemical context within which they can aggressively interact), one which removes the concealments everyday life often necessitates.

The plutocrats through their blind ambition accidentally create a space within which their adversaries are capable of launching a constructive protest.

Because no matter how polluted things are, their adversaries are still capable of absorbing the sun.