The Last Ship

So we’ve got our choice of apocalypses--and for fans of good, solid, action-packed summer TV escapism, that’s good.

It’s the expertly rendered combat scenes and vivid depictions of danger that provide excitement and suspense in this action-adventure tale.

If this “Battleship” meets “Contagion,” tension plus ick factor, hazmat-suits-for-all! kind of tale is your bag of summer escapism, then by all means climb aboard The Last Ship. It may be all formula and archetypes, but that’s Bay’s bread and butter, and the first two hours pack enough oomph to make you want to see what happens when the Ship finally pulls into port.

It’s entirely possible The Last Ship could turn out to be a cruise to nowhere, but in its first three episodes, it’s at least a fun ride.

While The Last Ship won't be for viewers who want a lot of complexity and good writing, its predictability--ka-boom!--is not exactly a detriment in the summer. In fact, it might be the selling point.

The cast is solid--including Adam Baldwin as Chandler's No. 2--and if we must contemplate annihilation-by-virus, there are certainly less-pretty places to view it than from the deck of The Last Ship.

The Last Ship would be better off developing its own new society tensions, medical nightmares and primal-survival adventures than leaning on black-hat stereotypes. Maybe it will end up heading in that direction, maybe it will succumb to more common cliches and become lost at sea. It could float either way.

Passable summer thriller with some decent (for TV) action sequences. The plot? You've been there, done that.

The result is an efficient slice of military-hardware porn. [20 Jun 2014, p.60]

Since the series was filmed partly aboard U.S. Navy vessels, aircraft and with other working equipment, when the big guns go off it looks and sounds satisfyingly earthshaking. Inevitably, some things are formulaic.

So as starts go, this one picks up speed, but still feels a little rocky. That said, there’s enough here to want to hang around for a spell, waiting to see whether this crew can find its sea legs--and what dangers lurk just over the horizon.

Being like a video game gives The Last Ship some nifty visual aesthetics and some good forward momentum, but it can’t give the series characters or storytelling worth giving a damn about.

One doesn’t expect a whole lot of nuance from Last Ship maestro Michael Bay, who’s also produced all four Transformers movies, with another one in the works. You just sit back, swallow this thing whole and wait for sturdy, studly, stolid Captain Chandler to fire off another round of uniformed rhetoric.

The Last Ship is a naval recruitment ad for the apocalypse, and these waters look shallow. Careful before sticking your toe in.

Dane is fine and steady center for the drama; his Chandler can handle banter, bathos (Chandler left a wife and kids behind in the now plague-decimated States) and blather (some of the dialogue is less written than forked out of a can).... Still, The Last Ship seems determined to put concept before character, which is a much bigger problem on television than it is on film.

The writing is clunky and the acting is almost universally stiff. The characters need to be much more engaging to keep us from wanting to jump overboard from The Last Ship.

Despite some initial problems with pace and a bland idea of suspense, The Last Ship is at least a break from all the detective and lawyer shows that characterize cable TV’s long summers.

People don't actually talk with each other in The Last Ship: Instead, they announce, pronounce and recycle cliches. We get a sense of character through the performances, though, and many of them are very good.

The Last Ship aims for a big-canvas feel, but based on the first three episodes, the one-dimensional characters and action movie cliché dialogue ("Guys, let's do this thing!") make it feel cramped.

Ship is awfully square in its hokey heroics, solemn acting and predictable subplots: a dull shipboard romance, a lurking saboteur. But it also has the feel of a summer page-turner, sturdy as the title vessel but also just as stodgy.