Battleship: Seriously, you could do worse

While participating in International Naval war games in Hawaii, a fleet of ships run into an alien armada who intend to conquer the earth. The ships and their respective crews must work together in order to stop this from happening.

A movie based off of a board game seems like a silly idea on paper and director Peter Berg's Battleship certainly does nothing to curb that line of thinking for it was a loud, inane summer popcorn action flick with barely enough story and character to make it sub-standard at best. It is not the worst thing to come out of Hollywood in recent years, in fact, the action and special effects looked and sounded great (guess they spent some of that purported $200 million dollar budget on something worthwhile, too bad it wasn't a script) but there was nothing beyond those special effects and action sequences to give the film life or intelligence. This lack of story, plot, or characters has led many critics to make comparisons of Battleship to the Transformers films (which, oddly enough are produced also by Hasbro). Critics have long chided the director the Transformers films, Michael Bay, for perpetuating the effects laden/story lacking films that Hollywood seems to turn out anymore. In some ways, they are right to do so. The Transformers film series peaked with the original in regards to presenting a whole film, with story and characters to go along with the special effects, and the only reason that happened was Bay had to establish the characters that were going to be around for those two sequels (well, Megan Fox only did one more but I don't think her "acting" ability was missed in the third one). The sequels were either brainless (Transformers 2) or had such stunning special effects, no one seemed to care about the terrible acting or story. Battleship felt like a mash up between those two films, it had a poorly constructed story with holes in the plot big enough to sail a destroyer through and a lead actor in Taylor Kitsch who lacked the screen presence (or acting chops in general) to lead a big budget summer film. Still, those special effects and other visual goodies (to go along with a twist at the climax of the film which featured some real American heroes) throughout provided enough entertainment to at least keep the audience engaged.

Don't believe the hype, Battleship wasn't so terrible that you won't be entertained at some points, it just lacked the intelligence and story to make it anything more than a brainless summer popcorn action flick.

Grade: C-