MOVIE REVIEWS: BATTLESHIP

Stupid. That’s the general consensus of critics reviewing the big-budget, board-game-based, sci-fi epic Battleship, about aliens bent on destroying the world. Take Amy Biancolli’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle: “It’s loud, it’s large, it’s stupid, and its best gag involves a chicken burrito. It features Taylor Kitsch wearing many more clothes, and maybe one more facial expression, than he did in John Carter,” she writes. Rex Reed in the New York Observer remarks that it appears aimed at “summer audiences with a high tolerance for stupidity and low expectations.” Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal observes that at some point in the movie, audiences may feel that they’re looking at one more “extinction-level event, one that threatens the end of logic, storytelling, characterization, hearing and maybe even the movie business as we know it.” However, he does allow that some of the lines in the script “rise above intentional stupidity into inspired idiocy.” But Linda Barnard in the Toronto Star regards the movie simply as “the loudest, dumbest alien-invasion movie based on a board game since, well, ever.” That’s a sentiment shared by Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News, who describes the movie as, “the worst humans-fighting-aliens movie I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of humans-fighting-aliens movies.” But some critics simply advise to forget trying to make sense of the script. “The film eventually comes down to lots of scenes in which things get blowed up real good,” Roger Ebert comments in the Chicago Sun-Times. And Neil Genzlinger in the New York Times suggests moviegoers regard Battleship the way they would “a macaroni dinner, familiar and easy to eat and not particularly nutritious.”