Battleship the board game is a war of attrition - a classic contest that pits mind against mind, requiring logic, intuition and carefully considered strategy. Battleship the movie unfortunately possesses none of these traits, and the result is a disappointing and surprisingly dull sci-fi blockbuster.

The convoluted story revolves around Alex Hopper, a reckless and irresponsible youth whose wild ways consistently disappoint his brother Stone, a respected officer in the U.S. Navy.

Taylor Kitsch plays the reckless Alex Hopper, while Liam Neeson is a veteran Navy Admiral.

A burrito-related felony results in Alex joining his brother at sea to avoid prison, and endeavouring to turn his life around, both to please his sibling and to impress his girlfriend's father, who just happens to be a Navy Admiral.

At much the same time, scientists have been sending transmissions to a newly discovered planet very nearly identical to our own in the hope that its inhabitants might be friendly. They are not, and before you can say Independence Day, the aliens are winging their way to Earth and destroying landmarks in Hong Kong and Hawaii in their efforts to trigger an extinction-level event.

A twist comes in the shape of the aliens quickly creating a force-field that's two nautical miles wide and rises more than 300,000 feet in the air to encircle the Navy. The barrier removes the radar capabilities of the ships trapped inside, and wouldn't you know it, out anti-hero Alex is aboard one of them.

What follows is a race against time as the Navy goes to war with the extra-terrestrial fleet, striving to save the world by quite literally sinking their alien battleships.



Which would be an entertaining enough popcorn movie if the story didn't swerve so wildly all over the place, imitating a myriad of blockbusters - Top Gun, Armageddon, Transformers, and the aforementioned Independence Day most obviously - but matching none of them in terms of either excitement or spectacle.

Instead the film gets weighed down by sub-plot after sub-plot, the aforementioned love story and sibling conflict just the tip of the narrative iceberg. So we also get Japanese-American hostilities in the shape of Hopper fighting with an officer named Nagata. And a group of grizzled WWII veterans offered a last shot at glory on their own aging battleship. And a frankly bizarre sub-story in which a double amputee teams up with a physical therapist - the latter played by a swimsuit model no less - to do battle with the aliens in a forest.

At times it feels like director Peter Berg - whose previous credits include Hancock, The Kingdom, and Friday Night Lights - is out to satirise the genre, sending up the work of Michael Bay rather than aping it, but the film is played with such po-faced stoicism and flag-waving jingoism that one soon rejects this theory.

Instead the sub-plots mount so that come the finale, the film threatens to collapse under the weight of its many tangents, and it's a testament to Berg's skills as a director that he reins proceedings in for the final few scenes, though even he can't make the sight of two ships firing at each other from distance particularly spellbinding.

But the fact that we never get a sense of who the visitors are or why they are here is what really sinks this Battleship. Sure, the human characters are paper-thin, making it nigh-on impossible to emotionally connect with them, but if the alien threat was tangible or real or in any way interesting, such shortcomings could be forgiven.

Rihanna disappoints as the tough-talking Navy officer Raikes.

But it seems that the only reason they exist is for our heroes to have something to do battle with, their various alien arcs carefully stage-managed to give each human character a neat and tidy resolution.

Those with a fetish for weapons and hardware will doubtless enjoy proceedings, the film featuring countless slow-mo shots of battleships and destroyers in action; the alien 'stingers' and 'shredders' imposing mechanical monsters of destruction.

However, if you're interested in plot logic and character development, you may want to give Battleship a miss. Taylor Kitsch is fine as the guy that Tom Cruise played in Top Gun and the bloke that Ben Affleck played in Armageddon, while Liam Neeson does what Liam Neeson does as cantankerous Admiral Shane (though at times it looks like he's glancing off-screen to locate his pay-check). But Alexander Skarsgard is wasted as Kitsch's bland older brother, and Rihanna fares even less well in her heavily-publicised screen debut. Her character is clearly supposed to be a tough-talking fighter in the vein of Aliens' Vasquez, but thanks to some truly horrible dialogue - "My daddy told me they'd come..." - the singer-turned-actress comes across as little more than a hot-headed fool.



Tadanobu Asano is the only actor who comes out of proceedings with any dignity, his Nagata an intriguing combination of intelligence, bitterness, humility and rage, and his complicated relationship with Kitsch makes for the film's most compelling scenes.

Indeed, had Battleship concentrated on this single human conflict alongside the alien invasion, it would have been a far better film, but instead producers threw everything at the muddled concept in the hope that something would stick, and regrettably little does.

Which perhaps calls into question the wisdom of turning a board game into a feature. Sure, you've got a recognisable brand-name for a title, but unless that's coupled with a clear and concise film-making vision the outcome can seem convoluted and confused.

And that's just the case with Battleship; a blockbuster that feels like it has been made by committee and designed to appeal to every conceivable demographic in an effort to grab the summer buck. The result is a film with some good ideas, but far more that are half-baked and barely developed, making for a frustrating film that fails to ever fully engage, and ultimately lacks the brilliant simplicity of the game on which it was based.
 
 
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