The most surprising discovery about Battleship director Peter Berg’s sci-fi military thriller is that it actually is based on the board game. 

The premise, because there is no plot, is that a fleet of battleships is caught behind some sort of electronic alien shield. The battleships can’t see their enemy and the enemy can’t see the battleships.  What to do? Well, pull up a grid and take turns firing potshots at each other: B-12 (miss), F-8 (miss), A-3 (It’s a hit!).  

But the most extreme effort to comply with the game board’s standards is how the film replicates those little white pegs used to mark our opponent’s hits as alien missiles. It’s one of the film’s more comical affectations as well as being one of the few that actually work.

Sadly, no one says, “You sunk my battleship!” a phrase so acutely connected to the game that its absence seems negligible. 

Battleship intends for us to have a rowdy good time but its frat-boy gone wild mentality only feeds into a notion that the American military is made up of fist-pumping, flag-waving hooligans and rabble-rousers. Watching the film is like being stranded on a bus with the winning side of an unruly rugby match – the celebration is in full swing but you jut want it to stop.

The dialogue seems purposefully inane but played so consistently straight that you can never be sure if the cast Taylor Kitsch, Rhianna and Brooklyn Decker know they’re in a bad movie. Certainly Liam Neeson is in on it, but is such an infrequent character it hardly matters how he reads his lines.    

About 20 minutes into Battleship you’ll start to wonder if you haven’t been duped into seeing another movie entirely – like, maybe, Transformers.

I suspect that when the doors to Roswell’s infamous Hangar 18 are finally opened, we’re more likely to discover leftover props, sets and devices from a declining interest in the Transformer movie franchise than any real evidence of aliens.  

Even without any first-hand Transformer experience (I’ve avoided all three) it’s hard not to mistake Battleship's thunderous metal on metal grinding destruction for anything but a feeble Transformer Reboot. The alien battleships resemble gigantic metal water-bugs jumping and prancing across the water like puppies in a wheat field.

Morphing a board game into a movie is a curious but not an original idea. Clue (1985) is probably the most narrative-friendly board game available and that proved to be a modest enough failure to stop whatever momentum that might have encouraged a movie out of the games Pick-Up-Sticks or Ker Plunk.

Hopefully Battleship will have a similar halting effect so that Hollywood can go back to making movies and stop toying with us – although should Hasbro take on SNL’s Andy Samberg’s suggestion to turn Hungry, Hungry, Hippo into a horror film, I’ll be first in line.

Director: Peter Berg
Run Time: 131 Minutes
Rating: 1/5 Stars