Battleship

A booze-sodden loser (Taylor Kitsch) joins the Navy and rises to lieutenant just in time to lead the counterattack against an invading army from outer space. Put that way, it sounds incredibly dumb—and it is, but not without a little fun. Of course, it’s all the rankest fantasy—not the alien invasion, but the idea that this screw-up would last in the Navy long enough to make lieutenant. The script is supposedly inspired by the Milton Bradley game, and writers Erich and Jon Hoeber actually manage to work the game in rather cleverly, having our terrestrial ships fire blindly on the enemy using deductive reasoning and a grid of marker buoys. But that’s the only vestige of cleverness on hand; the rest is pretty standard CGI mayhem, hammered across by director Peter Berg in his usual unsubtle style.