“Battleship” is the worst humans-fighting-aliens movie I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of humans-fighting-aliens movies. 
 
 Perhaps we should have been prepared for this cosmic joke of an action-adventure, as it’s based on the classic Hasbro board game — an absurdity its filmmakers have embraced with good humor, but not hit with good aim. While the game itself accounts for maybe 2% of the content (there are battleships, and at one point there’s a grid that must be analyzed), its spirit is entirely intact: This movie is impersonal, plastic and has lots of easy-to-misplace pieces. 
 
 Taylor Kitsch is Hopper, a miscreant with a heart of gold introduced in a beer commercial-type bar, being urged to shape up by his Navy officer brother (Alexander Skarsgard) and lusting after the daughter (Brooklyn Decker) of the admiral (Liam Neeson). Some time later, he’s in the Navy, hoping to marry the admiral's daughter before shipping out for some inter-naval games that bring several thousand sailors off the coast of Hawaii. 
 
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 That’s handy, because soon, wouldn’t you know it, aliens show up. They were hinted at in an early sequence, when bearded geeks worry about a signal sent off that invites other life forms to come and say hi. Turns out the ones who RSVP set up an invisible wall around ships in the water, then don’t react well when they’re fired upon. 
 
 The angry E.T.s send whirling buzzsaw-type objects which look like giant socket screws to cut through cities, and their spacecraft, which had plunged right into the ocean for some undisclosed reason, pop up and try to sink our battleships. Some aliens do end up on land, where one gets into a wrestling match with a double-amputee veteran. 
 
 Taylor Kitsch and Rihanna ponder the aliens’ moves in “Battleship.” ( ) 
 
 These not-scary, plan-less humanoid aliens, seen with their helmets off for a maximum of perhaps five minutes, look like Mickey Rourke with a goatee made of glass, suggesting some effects designer fell asleep on the job. There’s some TV chatter overheard about a “worldwide invasion,” but that little plotline seems undeveloped. 
 
 Also wasted is Rihanna, in her movie debut, as a member of Hopper’s crew. Couldn’t someone have devised a scene where music’s slinkiest star dances for even a moment? She simply makes stern faces as she presses buttons — which puts her pretty much on par with Kitsch, also the star of “John Carter” and a guy having a not-very-good year. Neeson, for his part, is back to coasting through big-budget wastes of time after a brief uptick with “The Grey.” 
 
 Director Peter Berg (“Friday Night Lights,” “Hancock”) can’t really be blamed, since someone had to steer this thing out of port, and it seems like the map was laid out according to the “Transformers” model. (Fans of “Independence Day” and “The Abyss” shouldn’t get their hopes up for anything equivalent here.) “Battleship” is too clunky and thudding to stay afloat for even the first third of its overlong running time, though the only ones who’ll really get soaked are ticket buyers. 
 
 Magic Moment: An alien is confused by a human’s metallic legs. 
 
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 Dana Stevens Dana Stevens is Slate’s movie critic. 
 
 Battleship (Universal/Hasbro) must have prevailed in whatever war it was waging on me, because three days after seeing it all I can remember is that it’s about battleships, and is based on the board game Battleship, and is about a lot of ships that … battle. Battleship (directed by Peter Berg of The Kingdom and Friday Night Lights) is a dumb action blockbuster, but not generously, life-givingly dumb, like the Mission: Impossible movies or Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (ahhh, 2012). This is the kind of summer movie that softens your brain tissue without even providing the endocrine burst of pleasure that would make it all worthwhile. It even—please fine me for saying this—makes Michael Bay’s Transformers movies look rollicking by comparison. 
 
 Given that it spends a good 85 percent of its 130-minute running time bludgeoning the viewers’ senses with explosions and CGI naval battles and hurtling alien vessels, Battleship has a lot of nerve asking us to care about the hastily sketched human dramas unfolding on the periphery. You know how, even in a terrible movie, there’ll often be one subplot or performance that you find yourself looking forward to during the dull parts? This film offers no such respite. Every storyline, from the ne’er-do-well Navy lieutenant who suddenly finds himself in charge of defending his ship from aliens to the physical therapist scaling a mountain with her double-amputee client, is equally worthy of dread. 
 
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 In the main plot, Taylor Kitsch plays Alex Hopper, a pouty, trouble-prone bad boy whose upstanding older brother (Alexander Skarsgard) manages to man-shame him into joining the Navy on his 26th birthday. But as a sailor Alex’s rebel ways continue, and he’s on the verge of getting kicked out of the Navy by his girlfriend’s father, the daunting Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson, sort of phoning in the dauntingness). First, though, Alex and his brother must take part in RIMPAC, an international training exercise in which the navies of different countries meet to simulate battle scenarios at sea. 
 
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 But RIMPAC becomes WTFPAC when, in the middle of the first day of exercises, Alex’s ship, the John Paul Jones, encounters an inexplicable looming monolith that turns out to be the base of operations for an invasion from outer space. Thus begins a long run of poorly differentiated scenes in which the John Paul Jones pluckily, and perhaps unwisely, takes on the alien megaships. It’s all a blur, but there were a lot of shots of people looking up slack-jawed at inconceivably large and powerful objects and saying things like “Jesus God in Heaven.” 
 
 In the B-plot, Alex’s girlfriend Sam (Brooklyn Decker), an exercise therapist, tries to coax a disabled vet (Gregory D. Gadson, a real-life Iraq vet who lost both legs above the knee) to join her on a hike up a Hawaiian mountain.* As it turns out, this is the mountain the aliens are trying to get to in order to use its SETI-style satellite base to send a message back home—one that will, we may only assume, boil down to, “Send more ships.” Will Sam and Mick make it to the satellite base in time to blow it up and save the world? Or will Alex and his comrades at sea get there first? What of poor Liam Neeson, looking on impotently at both action plots while separated from them by an alien force field? Will Alex’s derring-do in battle be enough to convince the admiral to grant his daughter’s hand in marriage? (That seriously is an important plot point in the story. In Battleship II, the issue of Sam’s bride price will be hammered out.) 
 
 Complaining about the acting in Battleship seems like misplaced aggression; it’s not the actors’ fault that the lines they’re speaking are so terrible. That said, there are some performances in this movie that are not so much wooden as Styrofoam. Kitsch, who showed promise as an action hero in the less-bad-than-it-could-have-been John Carter, does what he can with the role Alex Hopper, but his character arc basically consists of jutting his jaw out with steadily increasing stubbornness. The scenes with Decker and Gadson on the mountaintop alternate between frantic and placid, as if they can’t decide how much energy to invest in the impending destruction of Earth. Rihanna is more credible as a tough-as-nails petty officer on Alex’s ship; at least, unlike Sports Illustrated model Decker, she isn’t always filmed in Megan Fox-style soft focus in front of a wind machine. 
 
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 One of Battleship’s biggest mistakes was not to spend more time exploring its aliens’ culture and physiognomy. We only see two of the invaders up close for a few brief moments, and never hear their speech or observe them aboard their own ship. There are signs throughout that the aliens observe some sort of moral code—they tend to target technology rather than living beings, and at one point deliberately bypass a Little League game that lies in their path of destruction. Yet when it’s convenient for the jingoistic boo-yah energy of the story, the aliens once again become faceless monsters whose obliteration we should cheer mindlessly. I’d welcome a summer movie with morally ambiguous villains, but these are just out-of-focus villains—it doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of the writers that it would be more fun to hiss at the reptilian-eyed invaders if we knew what we were rooting against. 
 
 I should take back the above claim that Battleship lacks any saving graces. There are at least two deliberately funny moments that hint at the existence of a zanily witty Airplane!-style spoof buried in this movie’s turgid depths. In the first, the commanders of the John Paul Jones come up with a computer program to track the movement of the underwater alien ships, and the grid on their screen precisely echoes the look of the old Battleship board game—it’s as if, in the midst of all this thunderous manliness, Berg wants us to remember he knows it’s all a silly game. The second moment of wit occurs in the climactic battle sequence, when our ragtag heroes leap aboard a decommissioned WWII ship that’s been turned into a floating museum. For no reason that’s ever explained, a group of elderly veterans is standing by on the old ship (were they docents?), and the old salts proceed to help their juniors ready the ship for intergalactic warfare. As the concessions stand is triumphantly overturned, ACDC's “Thunderstruck” kicks in to accompany a sprightly fixer-upper montage. For those brief moments Battleship becomes something different, a jaunty mélange of Top Gun patriotism and Starship Troopers looniness. If a sequel is truly inevitable, maybe Peter Berg can be encouraged to steer the ship in that direction. ||||| Come for the aliens and stay for the naval warfare, and you’ll wind up raving about the patriotic salutes. Peter Berg's 'Battleship' may be based on a board game, but it ultimately defies anything you're expecting — in the very best way 
 
 Universal Pictures / AP Taylor Kitsch, left, and Rihanna 
 
 Battleship Year: 2012 Director: Peter Berg Studio: Universal Pictures Actors: Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker, Liam Neeson Related Movie Review: Battleship http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20587674,00.html 
 
 'Battleship' stays afloat in a sea of noise The Seattle Times 
 
 Based on a board game that became popular precisely for its prosaic, binary nature (hit/miss), one would expect a feature-length Battleship to be a decidedly one-note affair. But a funny thing happened on the way to mediocrity: The creative team behind this ocean-bound thriller decided to fill the narrative black hole with a few ingredients all but absent from today’s summer tent poles — namely mystery, nostalgia and a healthy dose of humility. Just as blockbusters have made the hard turn towards fantasy heroes who solemnly go about their business in high-def-but-low-impact 3D cage matches, Battleship is an unapologetically goofy, surprisingly enigmatic, refreshingly self-deprecating deviation from the norm. I hesitate to confess that I had more fun here than I did at The Avengers, because low expectations surely had a lot to do with it, but it’s the truth. Heck, I’d pay to see the thing again. 
 
 Director Peter Berg has apparently conceived of his production design as homage to (and improvement on) the works of Michael Bay — from Battleship’s militaristic grandstanding to its absurd romance, endlessly spinning action set pieces and deafening metal-on-metal sound effects. Right up top, ahead of the credits, Berg pulls a Bay in sprinting through the character introductions: You’ve got your lovable Hawaiian slacker Alex (Taylor Kitsch, Friday Night Lights) who can’t keep a job or get up the nerve to talk to the father of his girlfriend Sam (Brooklyn Decker). She’s a physical therapist on Oahu, working with wounded Navy veterans who are coping with life after amputations (her newest patient is real-life veteran and amputee Gregory D. Gadson). Complicating matters is her dad: Liam Neeson, admiral of the fleet. 
 
 Alex, you see, was brought into the Navy by his straight-laced brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård), who thought a life of rank and discipline would benefit his younger half. And sure enough, maturity comes quickly for the bumbling bro when, on a joint Japan-U.S. naval exercise, four mysterious objects crash through Earth’s atmosphere and into the Pacific. Anyone who has encountered the film’s relentless marketing blitz knows the basic outlines of what comes next: Aliens terrorize Earth, explosions dot the horizon, and our sailors must prevent this “extinction-level event.” 
 
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 …Only that’s not really how things play out at all. At every turn, the aesthetics and attitude of Battleship jolt us out of our comfort zone. Alex should be a plodding, predictable protagonist, a Shia LaBeouf replicant alternating between fear and vengeance. But so much of the plot hinges instead on Alex’s immaturity, his decided lack of experience and his gradual growth into a man who can lead his peers (including Rihanna, who plays a tough-as-nails naval gunner) through a crisis. 
 
 One would expect the arrival of the aliens to usher in a mindless volley of lasers and torpedoes. But while there are plenty of shots fired, and explosions to ogle, far more intriguing than the firepower is the mystery that shrouds the weaponry. In the first tense standoff, there’s a surprising level of studying and calculation at play, as the human first responders grapple to comprehend just what it is that they’ve found floating out in the middle of the ocean. Even after the aliens show their true colors and things turn hostile, the sailors — as well as the audience — begin to diagnose the weaknesses in the superior technology targeting them. Unlike most action heroes, who simply possess expert skills, Alex is learning as he goes, and we learn through his eyes. As his crew develops a new attack plan for the final climactic brawl, there’s something slightly more fulfilling about a strategy that’s evolved throughout the film. 
 
 If the alien introduction is more cryptic than we expect, the subplot playing out back on land is more inspiring. When the aliens track down the satellite array that initially brought them to Earth, they start to set up a base in rural Oahu, and that’s when Sam and Gadson join forces with a nerdy satellite operator (Hamish Linklater) to single-handedly take the array off line. A scientist, physical therapist and amputee taking out our E.T. invaders — one of cinema’s more unlikely motley crews. 
 
 As for the board game, it’s integrated into the film in surprisingly subtle ways (no one ever utters “you sunk my battleship!”). Once the aliens use a force field of sorts to separate three Navy vessels from the remainder of the fleet, we start to get closer to the actual scope of a Battleship board. And if you look and listen closely, you’ll recognize the cues: A destroyer, they say, can dish it out but can’t last as long as a battleship — which, as any player knows, can withstands two or three direct hits, but never four. When the radar goes down, the Japanese sailors teach their American counterparts a trick of the trade, using tsunami buoys to monitor displaced water. As the combined crews bring up a grid of buoys, and notice a disturbance near “Echo One-One” (that would be E11), the Battleship grid has been revived onscreen. 
 
 There’s something decidedly retro about the grid sequence, where winning the war at sea has less to do with technology than with instincts, trigger fingers and the equipment at hand. In fact, there’s something delightfully old-school about all the action in Battleship. As classic rock blasts in the background, the movie increasingly shifts its attention away from the spinning, glowing alien ships to the inner workings of mankind’s floating fortresses, paying tribute to veterans and the ingenuity of those in the armed forces. Sure, it’s slightly jingoistic, but when the aliens are calling for backup, we want to cheer for our side. 
 
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 I have yet to even address the harrowing ways in which the history of Pearl Harbor factors into this war of the worlds. But it offers a rousing final act to a film of surprising dexterity, alternating between sibling drama, behind-enemy-lines strategizing, naval war maneuvers, big guns that go bang, alien intelligence and a goofy spirit that shows Berg and company don’t take this all that seriously after all. 
 
 Here’s an audacious, inventive and character-driven blockbuster with some wit sprinkled in for good measure. It’s fun, and filled with a surprising degree of intrigue and suspense; an unlikely mix of Independence Day, Pearl Harbor, Jurassic Park and The Hunt for Red October. If it was called anything other than Battleship, I wouldn’t feel so guilty for loving every minute. ||||| Topics: Movies, Action movies, Summer movies, Entertainment News 
 
 One of the great marketing constants of contemporary Hollywood is the idea of appealing to the 11-year-old boy within every moviegoer (whatever gender that person may manifest on the surface). Almost every American movie released during the summer season has that squirmy pre-adolescent id in view, and about two-thirds of the movies made the rest of the year. But what about a movie as baffling and incoherent and flat-out stupid as “Battleship” — an alien-invasion adventure by way of a Hasbro game, or maybe the other way round — a movie that would make your inner 11-year-old stomp out of the theater in disgust? 
 
 It’s undoubtedly gilding the lily to claim that “Battleship” is the dumbest movie I’ve ever seen — for all that I front as someone who only likes Turkish films where people stare at the landscape without talking, I’ve seen a lot of dumb movies — but it’s definitely up there. Over and above its extraordinary, mind-melting level of stupidity, “Battleship” (which is directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Peter Berg, of “Hancock” and “Friday Night Lights,” and written by action-flick brothers Erich and Jon Hoeber) is also extremely weird. Its shameless and nonsensical combination of ingredients finally won me over, after a fashion, when I realized that its gung-ho Navy-recruitment propaganda and retrograde gender politics shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than the ZZ Top, AC/DC and Billy Squier songs on the soundtrack. The only point of the whole exercise is to make small boys whoop and holler. 
 
 You know that bar over on the roughneck side of town, the one where all the jingoistic, pro-military, America-hell-yeah movies go to quaff some brewskis and swap tales about kickin’ Communist hiney? Yeah, that one. Well, when “Battleship” shows up there and starts breaking beer glasses on its head, “Top Gun” and “Red Dawn” and “The Green Berets” get to feel all grown-up and complicated and full of girly-man sensitivity. That’s how stupid it is. Come to think of it, that’s the same Oahu tavern where we first meet our handsome but headstrong hero, Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch, last seen fleeing the ruins of “John Carter”), who’s enjoying a birthday beverage and stern lecture, both provided by his uptight Navy officer brother, Stone (Alexander Skarsgård). Let me back up and repeat that key piece of information: Skarsgård’s character is named Stone Hopper, and I promise that if you remind me of that in three years, I’ll still think it’s hilarious. ||||| Universal Studios hopes to rake in millions of dollars this weekend with the release of its new action film Battleship, and sales of the classic board game are expected to get a nice boost, too. As readers may recall, the game play is simple: Each player arranges five ships—an aircraft carrier, battleship, cruiser, submarine, and destroyer—on a ten-by-ten grid of squares and attempts to “sink” his opponent’s ships by calling out the squares where he believes his enemy’s ships are hiding. Most players approach the game as essentially one of chance, targeting squares at random and hoping for a “hit.” But is there a better strategy? If a friend challenges you to a nostalgic game of Battleship this weekend, is there a way to increase the chances that your fleet will emerge victorious? 
 
 There is. Nick Berry, a technology consultant and president of DataGenetics, a data mining company based in Seattle, has meticulously laid out several strategies that will improve your chances of sinking your opponent’s ships before she sinks yours. These methods are battle-tested: Berry created computer algorithms to employ his strategies in hundreds of millions of simulations so he could calculate their respective success rates. 
 
 
 
 Berry started by assessing the strategy most players intuit, which he refers to as Hunt/Target. The computer begins in Hunt mode—that is, firing at random until it hits a ship. When it has a hit, it focuses fire on the adjacent squares. Once the ship is sunk, the computer reverts back to Hunt mode until it hits another target. In Berry’s simulations, it took an average of 66 moves to sink an opponent’s battleship. It’s a serviceable approach, but there’s still a lot of random guessing involved. 
 
 To improve upon the Hunt/Target method, Berry devised a tactic that combines Hunt mode with the concept of mathematical parity. Think of it this way: Imagine if the board were color-coded like a checkerboard, with white and blue squares. Even the smallest ship—the destroyer—covers two squares, and would therefore have to rest on both a white and a blue square. Fire only at blue squares and you will eventually hit every ship at least once. This method effectively allows you to reduce the number of targets on the board by half when you’re in Hunt mode. (When you register a hit you enter Target mode, and both blue and white squares are in play until you sink the ship.) This strategy yields a slightly better average than regular Hunt/Target mode: an average of 65 moves to sink your opponent’s fleet. 
 
 Berry’s most efficient approach to Battleship uses a probability density function, which takes into consideration the different ways the ships can fit across the board. Here, Berry’s algorithm considers all of the possible configurations of the five ships and calculates a probability that any given square is occupied by a ship. At the outset of the game, obviously, the ships could be anywhere—there isn’t much difference in the probabilities for each square. But as the game progresses, you eliminate more and more squares from the board, and also reduce the number of possible configurations—the five-square aircraft carrier can’t be hiding in a four-square stretch of sea. A human player can’t realistically calculate the probabilities for each square as accurately as Berry’s model, but she can keep in mind the underlying strategy here. By considering the length of each ship that remains on the board and aiming for the area of the board that has the highest probability of containing those ships, you greatly improve your hit rate. When Berry’s computer used this approach, he reduced the average number of moves per game to 44 moves.
– It's got a cast full of hotshots and heartthrobs, from Taylor Kitsch to Rihanna to Liam Neeson, but Battleship is about as intellectually stimulating as its board game namesake. But despite the overwhelming critical vitriol, a few reviewers enjoyed it: "This is the kind of summer movie that softens your brain tissue without even providing the endocrine burst of pleasure that would make it all worthwhile," writes Dana Stevens at Slate. "It even—please fine me for saying this—makes Michael Bay’s Transformers movies look rollicking by comparison." "Battleship is the worst humans-fighting-aliens movie I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of humans-fighting-aliens movies," notes Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. It's a lot like the game: "impersonal, plastic, and has lots of easy-to-misplace pieces." At Salon, Andrew O'Hehir calls the film "baffling and incoherent," featuring an "extraordinary, mind-melting level of stupidity." But in Time, Steven James Snyder feels very differently, citing the movie's "mystery, nostalgia," and "healthy dose of humility." It's "an unapologetically goofy, surprisingly enigmatic, refreshingly self-deprecating deviation from the norm," he writes. In quasi-related news, click to learn about how to win at Battleship—every time you play.