Movie review:Battleship

JUST from the look of the movies budget-$200-million, it indicates what to expect.”Battleship” has been expanded considerably from its origins as a pre-World War I pencil and paper game to include a major alien invasion that puts the very fate of the human race at stake. Only the stalwartU.S. Navy stands in the way of what a nervous bureaucrat calls “an extinction event.” This may sound thrilling, but it’s not.The Peter Berg masterpierce features Taylor Kitsch (best known for his role in Berg’s TV hit “Friday Night Lights”) playing Alex Hopper, a stubborn and hot-headed young man who’s made a habit of screwing up his life.While his straight-arrow brother Stone Hopper (Alexander Skarsgård) is making a career in the Navy, Alex is doing things like breaking into a closed convenience store to procure a chicken burrito to impress a hot woman he’s just met in a bar. Really.Said woman, Sam Shane (Brooklyn Decker), just happens to be the daughter of Adm. Shane (the reliably gruff Liam Neeson), the man in charge of the entire Pacific fleet. Before you can say “anchors aweigh,” Alex not only has joined the Navy, but he’s also somehow become a lieutenant whom Sam has agreed to marry, with a catch: Alex, still a screw up, has to get the admiral to agree to the match.While these dubious shenanigans are going on, something called the Beacon Project is playing out in the background. NASA has been beaming a signal to the universe in an attempt to make contact with presumably friendly aliens. An outerspace race does get the signal and uses it to find its way to Earth, but these aliens are anything but friendly.

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Movie review:Battleship