The Racked Focus Review: Battleship (2012)

The date was May 22, 2012.  The place was The Racked Focus.  The writer was Maxwell Haddad.  This all set up the inevitable review of Maxwell Haddad’s review of Battleship, a movie that I myself adore.  Max was not so keen on the movie.  This difference of opinion is neither here nor there, as this is a review of the review and not a review of an opinion.  How about I dig into it now?  Does that sound fair?

This review is sort of a mess.  The opening sentence has a meaning behind it but is poorly constructed so as to not seem like a sentence; rather, it reads like an unedited thought where the actual clarity is absent.  Any confusion could be the result of a switch of person within the sentence itself.  The first portion of the sentence is in the first person, where Max uses “I.”  The second portion changes person to have Max use “one” in relation to a person.  This obstructs a clear sentence structure and leads to some added difficulty when trying to fully understand the review.  The messiness does not stop there, however.  The end of the review is painful to read.  The final sentence brings up a thought about the movie that was never mentioned throughout the entirety of the review up to that point.  Some elaboration may have helped to make this thought less jarring to the reader.  Endings are sometimes a difficult thing to do when writing.  I understand that completely.  I am not the best at ending my reviews, and I will admit that.  But to bring up a new idea and have nothing after that throws off the reader.  An ending should summarize the subject, and the final sentence should encapsulate the theme while possibly bringing up something to think about.  There is no conclusion to Maxwell Haddad’s Battleship review.  It just ends.  It feels wrong.  But there were also things that felt right about the review.

I always say this, and anyone who reads these reviews is likely getting tired of it, but I do like Maxwell’s use of language.  He tosses in some bigger, lesser used words in his reviews.  It feels natural to the review instead of feeling like someone showing off their vast vocabulary.  This time around, he used words like disingenuous, barrage, and unfaltering.  They are not the most obscure words.  In fact, these words are more on the common side than the uncommon side of the English language, I would think.  But they are not words that I would typically use in my reviews because my vocabulary is not as broad as some other people’s.  Reading a Maxwell Haddad review always gives me joy because of words like those.  It makes me want a bigger vocabulary.  His Battleship review is no different.

Also no different than Maxwell’s other reviews that I have reviewed is that he is able to seamlessly rattle off the names of actors but not have it feel like a list of names.  There is meaning to each name that Max puts into his reviews.  There is a reason for the name to be there.  Rather than it simply being a list of names for the sake of naming a bunch of people, each name is used to give insight into the movie.  This is a skill that is greatly appreciated because it breeds more thought.  Otherwise, the reader would lose interest in what they are reading and possibly decide to skim through the remainder of the review.  Mr. Haddad’s way of effortlessly integrating the names into the overall topic at hand keeps the attention of the reader and grips them into the review.  It is masterful.

I enjoy reading reviews written by the guys at The Racked Focus.  The majority of the reviews are well written, and entertaining.  But every writer has a bad day.  Maxwell Haddad’s review of Battleship seems like his bad day.  It feels as though his distaste for the majority of Battleship may have gotten in the way of some basic writing techniques that I have seen him execute well in other reviews.  The review is still as insightful as ever, but the flaws in the basic aspects of the writing, or what I felt were flaws, blinded me for portions of the review.  I am only a man.  I am not Devo.

Maxwell Haddad’s review of Battleship gets 2 ½ chicken burritos out of 5.