I’ll admit that I’ve not been a fan of bringing board games to cinematic life, but I was actually looking forward to seeing how Hasbro’s game “Battleship” would morph into an alien invasion movie.  Sadly, the board game is still better than the film.

The film takes way too much set-up time introducing its rebellious hero (Taylor Kitsch, fresh from John Carter) and a few other relatively young people who will shortly be counted upon to save the world.  None of them are interesting.  Then the aliens come, invited to Earth by a powerful (and visible!) radio beam message.  They hide in the ocean near Hawaii but only (why??) begin their invasion after a literal human touch. Logic, military protocol and common sense are all ignored once the invasion begins, with only a trio of destroyers matched against four sophisticated alien craft (the fifth was knocked off course and wiped out much of Hong Kong).

But how sophisticated or well-designed are these aliens?  They’re sort of like well-armed Transformers, as they can shift shapes and do things that should not be physically possible.  Yet, they fly through space but cannot fly in our atmosphere. Instead, they sort of jump across the ocean like gigantic metal frogs — which must be very uncomfortable for the humanoid aliens that pilot them.  And why do they jump? Because something about this movie must link back to the game, and because these craft displace the water when they jump, they can be tracked (they are invisible to our radar, somehow).  Thus, the Naval destroyers can play “Battleship” on their computer grids and attack.  Sorry, but this is just stupid.

Almost as bad is the notion that, even with three destroyer crews (much of which are eventually destroyed by the aliens), only a handful of officers actually run the ships and fight the aliens.  Out of hundreds, if not thousands of sailors, only about six actually account for anything.  One of them is Rihanna, who moves from sonar duty to weapons duty to boarding party machine-gunner.  Kitsch seems to be everywhere, even fighting aliens hand to hand when things get rough.  The movie stresses teamwork, especially before its exciting climax, but it is a hollow emphasis, evinced by having Taylor Kitsch almost single-handedly save the world.

Peter Berg’s film is, except for its awful beginning, quickly-paced and occasionally fun.  Every now and then something will remind one of the board game, and the last half-hour is actually pretty good, especially once a real battleship is brought into play.  But it is all too little too late, and a bit too much.  At 130 minutes, Battleship is simply too pumped-up for its own good, even with the ever-reliable Liam Neeson as an admiral.  Even with aliens (and I really, really like alien invasion flicks), I’d rather play the game.  ☆ ☆.  21 May 2012.